


Do Not Go Gently into that Cold Night

by SuperBlondie



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Angst, Cuddling & Snuggling, Fantasy AU, Fluff, God!Yifan, Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Magic, POV Alternating, Past Character Death, Reincarnation, Romance, Supernatural Elements, Winter, bc reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:57:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 34,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21829924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuperBlondie/pseuds/SuperBlondie
Summary: Chanyeol should really learn to check magical objects for warnings before he goes messing around with them.  OR In which Chanyeol unleashes winter and awakens a God that has to come fix his mess.
Relationships: Kim Jongdae | Chen/Kim Minseok | Xiumin, Park Chanyeol/Wu Yi Fan | Kris
Comments: 45
Kudos: 192
Collections: Round 3: Autumn and Winter - On the Snow





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt Flake:** #177  
**Author's Note:** Hello all! So this is my first time writing for seasonal and I really really enjoyed it! This fic fought me for a long time but I'm so happy with the finished product and I hope you are too! A big thank you to the prompter and the mods! I feel like I haven't done a big fic like this in a while (i have sort of taken a break from chaptered fics as of late bc of school and some burnout), and i forgot how much I love them.
> 
> As always, huge thank you to [Aarushi](https://twitter.com/Aarushi_c18) my beta for editing this fic! (she edited 39 pages in a day, what a trooper!)
> 
> (about trigger warnings and tags, please see that it was past character death but it is in conjunction with reincarnation so it counterbalanced in my mind but I want to make sure everyone has the chance to know what they're getting into!)

The last of the icicles that form on the gutter of the shop every winter is finally melting, dripping water onto the pavement below. It’s hardly more than an ice _chip, _not an icicle at all, but Chanyeol wants it to disappear with dignity, honoring the memory of the massive, glittering spike it was all winter long. So strong that it never broke no matter how many times he smacked his head on it on his way in and out of work.

It’s not quite the end of February, winter still holding on for a few weeks more. The weather took a turn for the warmer on Monday, though, and hasn’t let up all week, the signs of winter disappearing every time Chanyeol turns his back.

A flower is sprouting from a crack in the sidewalk underneath the icicle, pretty pink petals unfurling as it searches for the sun setting over the horizon. The icicle gifts it another drop of water and the flower’s hungry roots soak it all up. Chanyeol watches it from the front window of the shop with a little smile.

His rags and bottle of cleaning fluid were abandoned on a stool in favor of people-watching. And, when the people all disappeared inside cars and nearby restaurants for dinner, nature-watching. The little flower has somehow managed to grow in the perfect spot to avoid being trampled so far and Chanyeol checks on it whenever he can to make sure that it’s still doing okay.

“The flower again?”

Chanyeol jumps, twisting around to see his boss sticking his head out from the door to the back of the shop, feeling like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Minseok stares at him with one impressively thick eyebrow raised, somehow amused but irritated at the same time. His lips don’t turn up until Chanyeol goes to grab his cleaning supplies.

“Sorry, boss,” he starts as he grabs one an antique jewelry box off the nearest shelf, “Won’t happen again.”

Minseok snorts and Chanyeol feels his cheeks heat. He rubs a little harder at the old, scratched wood exterior of the little box with the dry rag, wet rag tossed aside so he doesn’t damage the wood and irritate his boss further. “Like hell it won’t. Just try to keep the flower-watching until after you’re done cleaning. I really don’t care what you do as long as your job gets done, Chanyeol, you know this.”

Chanyeol looks up in surprise at the change in tone. Minseok’s gaze is softer than it was before, a fond smile on his face. “It’s hard to be mad at you. Your kicked puppy routine is terrifyingly effective.”

“K-kicked puppy routine,” Chanyeol sputters. “I don’t have a kicked-puppy routine.”

From somewhere in the back of the shop, over the soft, tinkling music Minseok always likes to have playing – says it provides a certain atmosphere that fits an antique shop – comes Jongdae’s voice, “I told you, it’s just his face. You get upset at him and he makes that face and then _you’re _the asshole. It’d be fucking diabolical in the wrong hands… Hey, Yeol, how would you feel about robbing a bank with me?”

“No turning my only employee onto a life of crime. I’ve already got my hands full with you, I don’t need to start worrying about him too,” Minseok shouts back and then disappears into the back of the shop once more, shutting the door with a quick wave.

Chanyeol is alone in the front of the shop again, and he turns his back on the front windows and the flower, furrowing his brow at the shelves of antique trinkets and abandoned heirlooms. They’re stuffed full, clumped into categories. He can tell which categories were made by Minseok and which came from the pandemonium of Jongdae’s mind, a cluster of jewelry boxes on the shelf in front of him and a circle of angel statues worshipping a cat figurine on the one below.

He cleans each and every item with care, working the corner of the rag damp with cleaning fluid into the mouth of the cat figurine and grabbing an extra soft rag from behind the cash register to dust the oldest, most delicate of their items. The oldest of the items Minseok and Jongdae put out front, at least. Chanyeol’s pretty sure there are some _old _things in the back, things older than the entire city, the entire _country_.

He isn’t allowed back there though. Minseok had been careful to explain that it wasn’t because he wasn’t trusted, but because it’s just that some of their oldest items are too delicate to be cleaned regularly.

It doesn’t bother Chanyeol to be barred from the back as much as he thought it would. Though that’s mostly because he gets the entire front all to himself most days. He’s free to shove headphones in and listen to music as he works.

And he does just that now; he digs his phone out of his backpack from where he stashes it in the cupboard underneath the creepy, spine-chillingly realistic porcelain dolls. It’s the safest place in a store filled with valuable items, so safe that the one time a thief did try to break into the shop late one night, they only got as far as within seeing distance of the doll shelf before turning right back around.

The dolls are so creepy that Jongdae and Minseok only ask him to clean them when one of them is there to make sure none of them suck out his soul or rip his face off.

Chanyeol likes to the think that they wouldn’t do that though. He left out a plate of cookies for them on his first day as a peace offering and came back at the end of his shift to crumbs; he leaves more out every month in exchange for keeping his soul and face.

They watch over him now as he wipes down a giant wardrobe, TWICE’s discography playing in his ears. The sound is tinny, crackling over the shitty headphones he keeps in his backpack. It’s all he has though, considering there’s no way he’ll ever take his good headphones out of his apartment.

Twelve pairs of eyes see Chanyeol huff in irritation as the music pops and cracks. Finally, he pulls the headphones out and sets his phone on a nearby shelf to play into the open air. Dust falls from the shelf as the wood settles, and Chanyeol continues on with his work, humming softly to himself. Time passes quickly as the songs fade from one to the next. The sun dips down below the horizon and the streetlights flash on. They shine through the front windows and cast strange shadows behind the antiques.

Chanyeol’s just finishing wiping down the last of the antiques, a pretty ornament that reminds him of howling winds, when he sees the door to the back of the shop swing open. “Closing early?”

Jongdae comes out with his hands in his pockets, eyes roving over the freshly cleaned wares as he disappears between the shelves. “Minseok and I have to take off early. Got a meeting with a buyer for that painting Min bought a few weeks ago at an estate sale,” he calls from somewhere near the books. “She’s looking to trade one of her other paintings and wants us to come take a look at it, see if it’s worth enough for an even trade.” He pauses to swipe a finger along one of the back shelves, the ones their last employee always liked to skip because he thought no one would notice. “Everything looks so clean out here! Good job, maybe I can convince Minseok to not fire you for flower-watching on the job.” Jongdae’s mouth curls up in a grin, eyes thinning into happy little slits as he laughs at his own joke.

Chanyeol grins and settles onto the stool behind the cash register, props his elbows up on the glass case holding all the jewelry. “Oh thank you, my merciful overlord.”

Jongdae’s head appears from around one of the shelves. “Is that sarcasm I hear? You know, it’s been about a month since you last fed the dolls, I bet they’re feeling pretty hungry. And human faces probably taste just as good as homemade cookies.”

“He’s the last person the dolls would eat,” Minseok snorts as he follows his husband out from the back of the shop. “If the dolls were going to kill one of us, it would be you, Dae. You taunt them too much.”

He leaves the door open as he walks to the doll cupboard to grab his briefcase and his and Jongdae’s jackets, and Chanyeol can’t help but stare. It can hardly be considered open, all the lights off so there’s nothing peeking out from the crack or from underneath, but it draws his eyes regardless. He imagines a wind blowing in and knocking it open just a little more.

He blinks away the thought and looks to where Jongdae and Minseok are shrugging on their jackets, bickering about whose face would be the most delicious to a sentient doll. Jongdae says it’d be Chanyeol because he has a thing for sweets; Minseok insists it’s Jongdae because the satisfaction the dolls would get from eating his face would outweigh his actual taste. The strangest thing about the conversation is that it’s not the weirdest thing they’ve bickered about.

“I’ll go start the car,” Jongdae finally gives up after Minseok offers to ask the dolls their thoughts on the matter. Chanyeol watches him skirt around the doll cupboard as he goes to take the keys from Minseok and has to hide a smile. The bell on the door chimes as the door swings open and lets Jongdae out onto the street, muttering about dolls and traitor husbands.

“What an idiot,” Minseok sighs. He leans against the jewelry case as he and Chanyeol watch Jongdae walk down the darkened street to the car. “I can’t stand him.” Chanyeol just rolls his eyes because Minseok’s voice says anything but. His eyes track Jongdae as he passes from streetlight to streetlight, shoulders tense until Jongdae gets into their car. Chanyeol smiles to himself and imagines what it must feel like to care about someone that much, to be cared about in the same way.

Then Minseok turns back to Chanyeol with a deceptively sweet smile. “So, Chanyeol, my favorite employee –”

“Aren’t I your only employee?”

“Details, never really cared for them. But you know what I do care for? Keeping the shop open and making sure you’re well compensated for all the work you do.” Jongdae whines about Chanyeol being unconsciously manipulative and then goes home every night with _this_. Chanyeol doesn’t know what Minseok’s going to ask him to do, but he knows he’s going to do it – mostly because it’s his job to do whatever is asked of him, but also because Minseok makes it hard to say no. “So I know we usually let you go when we go home, but I need you to stay for _just _a little longer. I need you to go into the back and grab a few things for me. There’s a buyer coming early tom-”

Chanyeol nearly leaps off his stool, eyes darting from Minseok’s face to the cracked open door and back again. “The back,” he repeats, voice booming out louder than he meant it to, “I get to go in the back?”

Minseok laughs at him but he can’t muster up even an ounce of embarrassment. He’s wanted to see the things stashed in the back since he started working at the shop, feeling like a kid stuck on the ground, staring up at a cookie jar on the highest shelf.

“That was much easier than I expected. If I knew you wanted to see the back so bad, I would’ve let you in months ago. But yes, you do.” He pulls a piece of paper out of his front pocket and drops it onto the glass case. “These are all the things I need you to grab for me and leave behind the cash register. Everything’s labeled back there so it shouldn’t take you long. I’d do it myself, but I got sidetracked going over inventory and ran out of time.”

Chanyeol unfolds the paper and scans the list, eyes widening at dates that go back farther than Jesus. “Holy shit, how do you even _have _some of this stuff?”

Minseok’s lips curl up, pride flashing in his eyes like a leopard after making a kill, “It’s all about connections, Chanyeol. And I have many, many connections.” And then his grin shifts into something gummy and sweet as he reaches across the jewelry case to ruffle Chanyeol’s hair. “Thanks so much for all your help! I know I tell you this all the time, but Jongdae and I really appreciate having you around.”

“Y-yeah, of course. No problem,” Chanyeol stammers, head spinning. He shakes his head to resettle his hair and Minseok heads toward the door like he didn’t just do the emotional equivalent of a three-point-turn.

It’s moments like these that remind him that he knows very, very little about his boss – either of his bosses – aside from their names and a vague idea of their ages. They aren’t the most open people, and he’s done his best not to pry, but it’s moments like these, when Minseok or Jongdae are just a _little_ off, when he knows he’s missing something, that he wishes he’d been a little more nosy.

The bell on the front door chimes as it swings open. Minseok pauses in the doorway, night breeze blowing in around him, chill sending goosebumps up Chanyeol’s arms. His boss turns to look at him with a concerned little frown, “Text me or Jongdae when you get home, okay? Or you can wait here and we’ll swing by after our meeting and drive you home. You walking home worries me.”

Chanyeol shrugs off Minseok’s offer with a smile. “Nah, don’t come back for me. I’ll be okay,” he says, “but I’ll make sure I text one of you.”

A nod of agreement and a few seconds later and Minseok’s gone, hurrying towards his car. Chanyeol watches him go, keeps watching until his bosses drive off and he’s completely alone in the shop with the creepy dolls and the door to the back that’s still cracked open.

The clock hanging above the display of fine china says it’s half-past seven. It’s more than enough time for him to gather all the items on Minseok’s list and lock-up the shop before it officially closes at eight if he hurries. But he’s pretty sure he’s not going to hurry, not when he’s finally getting to see the back and all the goodies Minseok and Jongdae keep back there. He’s been watching them cart wrapped-up bundles in and out of that door for months, always wondering what they were carrying but never finding the courage to ask.

Now, list of antiques in hand, Chanyeol gently pushes the door to the back of the shop open and peers into the darkness. Another push and the door opens all the way, light spilling in and reflecting off objects lining the walls. He fumbles on the nearest wall for a light switch and shuts his eyes against the sudden brightness. “Woah,” he breathes as he opens them again, taking in the museum Minseok and Jongdae have hidden away.

Chanyeol is reaching out a hand and running his fingertips across a mask twisted into the sneering face of an oni before he can stop himself, the metal cold under his fingers. He traces the oni’s lips before he snatches his hand back at the sudden sensation of teeth closing around his wrist.

“Sorry,” he bows his head to the mask.

The room brightens up like someone’s thrown back the curtains on a sunny morning. Chanyeol looks around for a lamp or another ceiling light farther into the room. He finds none. Turning back to the oni mask, a shiver runs down his spine. It wasn’t smiling earlier.

He takes a deep breath and jams his hands into his pockets, careful not to touch anything else. “This is why they didn’t want to let you back here, stupid. They knew you’d fuck something up.”

The dolls like him, but that doesn’t mean everything else will. And then Chanyeol’s ears heat as he remembers how much people used to make fun of him for being so superstitious. It’s not that he _actually _believes in ghosts and demons, but he figures it can’t hurt to be respectful to creepy dolls and ancient masks – just in case.

The shelves are set up in no discernible order, items settled in such strange order that it almost feels like they picked the spots themselves. Chanyeol snorts and pretends the thought doesn’t make him a little queasy. The items have been labeled meticulously, though, hand-written notes plastered down in front of each item.

The note in front of the oni mask warns _Do not touch_. Chanyeol cringes, sucking in a breath through his teeth and hurrying farther into the storeroom.

Even with Chanyeol taking his sweet time to peruse the wares and gawk at some of the treasures Minseok and Jongdae have been hiding – a clay ring in a plastic bag from Mesopotamia, a pair of breeches that the label says belonged to George Washington – it doesn’t take long to find each item on Minseok’s list. And, thankfully, none of the items on Minseok’s list share the same label as the oni mask that Chanyeol has promised himself to never look at again.

The last thing he needs to get is an antique revolver from the nineteenth century. The youngest thing on his list and, if he’s honest, the least interesting. The item he grabbed before it was a wooden figurine from the _Aztec Empire_, a dusty gun really can’t compete with that.

The gun is sitting on a shelf full of other weapons, mostly other guns, but some knives and daggers. “Bonnie Parker’s gun,” Chanyeol reads as he runs his finger across one of the labels, “Never reload.” He frowns at the way the shiny metal glints at him in the light and shuffles to the left to the gun he’s actually here for.

It’s an old Colt pistol that has no other label but its model and year, a box of ammunition settled next to it. Minseok’s list explicitly states that the seller isn’t interested in the ammo, so Chanyeol leaves it be as he drops the gun into the kangaroo pouch he made out of his shirt once he realized there was no possible way even his giant hands could hold everything on Minseok’s list at once.

He starts to turn back towards the door to the front of the shop, list completed, when a flash of blue catches his eye.

On the shelf below the Bonnie Parker’s gun is a black velvet drawstring bag. It’s drawn nearly all the way shut, enough to keep its contents in but not enough to close the opening at the top. Peeking out from the opening, such a bright blue that it almost looks like it’s glowing, is the tip of some sort of knife. It draws Chanyeol in, makes him crouch down for a better look.

“Pretty,” he breathes. From his new angle he can see more of the knife where it rests inside the bag. The metal of the blade is crazy, a dazzlingly bright blue, but translucent – like looking at the sky through an icicle. It’s covered in etchings of snowflakes from base to tip. He shivers despite the heater whirring in the vents above him, muscles jumping unconsciously.

For a second, he almost thinks it a toy blade because real knives don’t look like that. But then he shifts onto his knees and watches as the light shifts as well to show the sharp, sharp edge of what he thinks is a knife. It isn’t until he opens the bag and pulls the velvet covering the blade away that he realizes it’s a dagger. Chanyeol stares at it, turning the blade this way and that to catch the light.

He isn’t fixated, isn’t caught in trance, just a magpie fascinated by something shiny, so fixated that he doesn’t notice the chill seeping through the thick velvet bag, the tiny shivers running through his shoulders.

It’s the cold that should stop him, should make him pause and take a moment to really look at what he’s holding. It should make him take a moment to look beyond what he’s holding and read the label on the shelf. But he doesn’t think about the cold, doesn’t think about the label, doesn’t even think about the fact that Minseok and Jongdae are trusting him not to mess with any of their relics. He does not stop to think at all.

Instead, Chanyeol shifts his grip to let the velvet bag drop to the ground and grabs the dagger by the handle, skin of palm flush against frost-covered metal. And _then _he notices the cold.

He yelps, throwing the dagger in surprise as he yanks his hand back towards his chest. “Son of a bitch!” His palm is bright red from the cold, fingertips half-numb. He whines at the pain and sticks his fingers in his mouth to try and heat them back up.

“What the hell,” he whispers after a few moments, voice echoing in the empty air. His fingers are warm again and tingling as all the nerves come back online. He takes a deep breath and shuts his eyes to try and slow his racing heart. When he opens them again, his gaze settles on the dagger where it landed halfway across the room. “What the _hell_?” And then, “_Oh shit!”_

The dagger, lying at the base of the nearest wall, is no longer that same bright blue it was when Chanyeol first picked it up, color now the same opaque, metallic gray of any other knife. Chanyeol picks it up and it’s room temperature, no colder than any other thing he’s grabbed off one of the shelves.

There’s a knick in the flat side of the blade, up near the tip. It can barely even be considered a knick, more of a crack. Chanyeol runs a finger over it and winces at the rough edges. He turns the blade over in his hand and gasps at the awful, horrible, painfully visible, _enormous_ crack running from where the handle meets the base of the blade to Chanyeol’s finger.

“Oh no. Oh no no no.” His heart thuds painfully in his chest, guilt making his stomach twist and his face heat. He sinks his teeth into his lower lip until it hurts, until he can taste copper. “I’m in so much trouble. I’m so in much _fucking _trouble, oh my God.”

Minseok is going to fire him. Minseok is going to _sue _him. The dagger is a relic that’s probably worth more than Chanyeol’s _life_. And worse than losing his job, than going bankrupt because there’s no way in hell he’ll be able to cough up enough money to pay for the damage he’s done, is that Chanyeol’s lost two of his only friends.

He doesn’t think they know that they’re two of his only friends, that he even considers them friends in the first place. But ever since Baekhyun and Kyungsoo moved away after graduation for better jobs, Minseok and Jongdae have been all the social contact he really has anymore. It’s why he doesn’t mind working so much, why he comes in if they call him even if it’s supposed to be his day off. Chanyeol just wants them to like him, to invite him out for drinks the way they do with the ladies who run the tailoring business next door.

He thought that being allowed into the back was some sort of sign that all his hard work was paying off, that he’d earned their trust. That maybe, just maybe, they were starting to think of him as more than just an employee.

Chanyeol stares down at the dagger, metal cracked and dull, looks to the velvet bag sitting empty on the floor. Minseok and Jongdae will hate him if they find out about the dagger. They don’t have to find out though, no one does. He can fix this if he has just a little time.

And so, with shaking hands, blood rushing in his ears, Chanyeol cinches the drawstring bag shut and puts it back on the shelf, careful to leave it in the only space devoid of dust.

He’s so focused on making it look like the velvet bag hadn’t been touched that he still doesn’t notice the neatly printed label of _Do Not Touch! Extremely Fragile_.

He sprints back out to the front of the shop a moment later. The items Minseok had asked him together are left in a pile behind the glass case with the list on top. After that, it’s quick work to lock up all the cases and turn any lamps Jongdae might’ve left on while he was opening the shop earlier that morning.

Chanyeol’s hands shake uncontrollably as he works to close the shop. He feels eyes on him, heavy and judgmental. He refuses to look at the shelf full of dolls until he’s pulling his backpack out from the bottom cupboard, all the lights already off. “It’ll be fine, okay? I’ll fix it and then put it back an-and no one has to know. Most of the stuff back there never gets sold anyway, it’s just stuff Minseok and Jongdae like to collect. So it’s not like I did anything _really _bad.” He’s not sure who he’s trying to convince, himself or the dolls.

He slips the dagger into the front pocket and packs his jacket around it so it doesn’t jostle around on the walk home. He pauses before he zips his backpack up. “I-it was an accident, you know? I just got startled and threw it on accident. Minseok and Jongdae would understand if I told them it was an accident, wouldn’t they? I could work off whatever I owe them. They’re not evil. If I just – if I just told them, they wouldn’t have me arrested.”

Chanyeol reaches for the handle of the dagger with one hand and his phone with the other, throwing whatever his hands his touch into his backpack as he tucks his phone into his pocket. He doesn’t want to _lie_ and have this awful thing stretch on for however long it takes him to get the dagger fixed and back in the velvet bag. If he comes clean, it’s over and he can accept his punishment like a grown man and move on.

But then his brain conjures up Minseok and Jongdae’s faces, disappointed and hateful. Lying is awful, but losing Minseok and Jongdae’s trust is much, much worse.

He zips up his backpack, slings it over his shoulder, and heads out the front door. He locks the door behind him and swallows down the guilt rising up like bile in the back of his throat. He turns the music playing on his phone up as high as he can stand it to block out his thoughts and starts down the street towards home, eyes trained on the ground.

He’s so caught up in his own head, he doesn’t notice the dark, swirling clouds forming overhead.

***

Somewhere deep in the coldest of mountains, hidden by centuries of nature grown over itself, a man lies upon a stone altar. Not quite a man, but something shaped like a man, that looks like a man, sounds like a man, and sleeps like a man. And the thing that looks like a man sleeps, has been sleeping for longer than nearly living creature can remember.

The creatures that can remember him are glad that he sleeps. They rejoice as the world passes him by as he dreams of nothing because they remember what the world was like when he was awake.

They remember the endless cold, piles of ice and snow that only accumulated and never melted. They saw those dark, twisting skies, watched as seas froze solid and life disappeared. The creatures knew the man and the man knew the creatures, watched in horror as the cold took them one-by-one until there were hardly any left. He could only watch as the cold took the most important of all the creatures, froze long limbs solid and stilled the sweetest of smiles.

The thing that looks like a man couldn’t bear to watch another life be snuffed out, and so he begged the Skies and the Earth for an answer. He offered everything in his power – _anything_ if it would bring an end to the cold. When the Skies and the Earth said that the cold could only be weakened and shortened, that it would always rule over a quarter of the year no matter what anyone did, the thing that looks like a man replied that that was enough. Life could flourish the rest of the year, grow strong enough to withstand the cold.

And so the Skies and the Earth bound the worst of the cold into a vessel of metal. In return, the thing that looks like a man was doomed to sleep for eternity, never allowed to see the world he had given everything the save. Never to awake unless the cold breaks free of its prison.

The man on the altar of stone laid down to sleep as the sun broke through the clouds and the newest layer of snow began to melt, praying that he would never wake again.

The man on the altar of stone opens his eyes as a dagger made of metal and weakened by centuries of the worst sort of cold cracks on the floor of an antique shop. He sees darkness first, then the stone ceiling of his resting place, and realizes he’s awake.

“_No!”_


	2. Chapter 2

He takes to the skies a second later. The dagger, broken and empty of its long-suffered burden, sings to him, calls him home over the blood rushing in his ears. Anger is a gnashing, snarling monster behind his teeth. He wonders how anyone could be so stupid as to wake him, to unleash the death he’d given up _everything _to seal away.

It must be a demon, an evil, malicious thing bent on crushing the world beneath its feet. Or maybe one of the last of the dying line of sorcerers, freeing winter with the foolish notion of controlling it, taking that power for their own. He laughs at the idea, a bitter, furious sound that burns his throat on the way out. Winter is not a thing to be controlled. It is darkness and cold and hunger, death unparalleled.

Wind whips past his face, cold and unforgiving. Winter has already started to take hold in the skies, snowflakes drifting down from the clouds like the harbingers of the apocalypse.

He doesn’t feel the cold, but he can see rabbits on the ground that do. Offspring are herded back into dens and burrows to protect them from the chill. It won’t work though, winter’s reach is long and its fingers do not care how small or precious the lives they snuff out are. But he does, he cares for each and every one of them, cares that they have a chance to grow in the sun, bask in the warmth and eat grass and leaves green and lush from the guiding hands of spring.

Spring must be coming for so many young to be out – so many that are too young to survive more than a few days in the biting cold of winter. Their parents will follow soon after. He knows this, he watched it all happen so long ago.

He isn’t sure how long he’s been asleep, A long time, certainly, but not long enough. Or perhaps too long. Winter has been sealed away for so long that the world has forgotten about it, about what it can do if left unchecked. But the skies remember, the Earth remembers, _he _remembers. He remembers what winter can do – what winter _will _do if it is allowed dominion over the world again.

He _refuses _to give winter anything ever again.

He flies faster, and the wind dries his tears.

***

“Local blacksmiths...local blacksmiths…local blacksmiths – why the fuck aren’t there any local blacksmiths?” Chanyeol frowns at the page full of irrelevant links about the history of blacksmithing and local hotties that want to talk to him. There are a few websites about modern blacksmiths, full of addresses and portfolios, but they’re all halfway across the country, if not farther. The closest blacksmith is a ten-hour drive and Chanyeol doesn’t have a car.

He’s not sure any blacksmith he manages to get to will even be able to help him. Every modern blacksmith he’s found has a portfolio filled with steel, iron, and bronze. _Normal _metals that make sense, that look nothing like the dagger sitting on the couch beside him in a shoebox surrounded by soft cloth and cotton balls.

Chanyeol had set up the little nest to keep the fragile metal from cracking any more, but now the metal looks hard to the touch, solid, like he could drop it from the roof of his apartment building and find it on the sidewalk completely unharmed.

The dagger isn’t cold anymore either. He’s only touched it once since he brought it home last night to move it from his backpack to the nest he made out of the shoebox. It was only a little chilly then, so it’s probably room temperature now. He doesn’t want to touch it and find out, terrified that his touch will make the whole thing disintegrate. He doesn’t want to keep searching for blacksmiths, he doesn’t want to go into work later and pretend that everything’s fine and he didn’t break a priceless artifact.

He doesn’t want to pretend that it’s completely normal for a dagger to glow and be cold as ice in a normal, climate-controlled antique shop.

He leans back against the couch, eyes squeezed shut to block out his own thoughts. He opens them and yelps as he’s nearly blinded by a beam of light, mid-morning sun that had been blocked by his body earlier hitting the dagger at the perfect angle to burn his retinas. Chanyeol leans forward to block the light again and rubs at his now stinging, watery eyes.

“You’re an asshole. I hate you,” he says to the dagger, face scrunched up in the nastiest scowl he can manage. He waits for a moment, a part of him that’s being driven a little insane by guilt already wondering if the dagger will respond and prove that this is all a very bad dream. But it doesn’t, so Chanyeol accepts the fact that he’s just a crazy man sitting on his couch, talking to an ancient dagger that he broke and then stole from work.

The heater kicks on again, startling Chanyeol so badly he nearly knocks his laptop off his lap. It’s been turning off and on since last night, working tirelessly to keep Chanyeol’s apartment warm. The weather app on his phone warned him about a cold spell, winter coming back for one last party before it gives way to spring and Chanyeol can turn off the heater and open the windows to save money on his electric bill. He didn’t think it would be _that _cold, but the way his heater has been a near constant thrum says otherwise.

It reminds Chanyeol of his first year of college when his roommate was a Floridian who couldn’t stand temperatures under eighty and made their heater work so hard that it gave out in the middle of January. Maintenance had taken a full week to fix it, and Chanyeol had spent that week in the library, only returning to the dorm to sleep under every blanket he owned while wearing two and his warmest pajama pants.

It was an experience he never wants to repeat again. And so, he sets his laptop on the coffee table and shuffles over to turn the thermostat down to sixty. “There, there,” he pets the wall beside the thermostat and attempts to soothe his overworked heater as it turns off. “See? No need to give out and turn me into a popsicle.”

Back to the couch he goes, grabbing an extra blanket on the way so he won’t get too chilly. He settles down as carefully as he can so that he doesn’t jostle the dagger and grabs his laptop to look into at-home blacksmithing.

The heater kicks on again with a wheeze. “What the fuck,” Chanyeol looks around the room in confusion, eyes wide.

He gets up to check the thermostat make sure he set it correctly. It says that it’s set at sixty degrees, but the heater is rumbling away in the walls. Chanyeol turns it down to fifty-five. The heater stops for a moment, and then turns right back on. So he drops it all the way down to fifty and wraps his blanket around his shoulders as tight as he can, frowning at the thermostat.

The heater turns off for what he hopes is the last time. He watches the thermostat as he backs away, daring it test him one more time. “Don’t _even _try it.”

He shivers as he walks backwards, jerking as he steps on tile and wood that’s already beginning to cool. He doesn’t even make it back to the couch before the heater is going _again_. “What the hell,” he yells, “it’s set a fifty! What do I have to do to get you to turn off?!” The heater just rattles back at him.

Cold air blows past him, slipping through his layers of blanket and clothing. Mouth dropping open in surprise, he turns and sees his kitchen window coated in layers of frost so thick that he can’t even look outside. It’s almost too thick to even be considered frost, more like the ice that forms on the surface of a still lake than the stuff he used to draw in with his finger as a kid.

A hot breath on the glass does nothing to melt the frost, fingers sticking when he tries to rub away some of what had formed on the inside. Cold air sneaks in through each and every gap between the window and the frame. Chanyeol wonders if he should go grab a few towels and try to plug up the holes, if this is why the heater won’t turn off.

It takes a few minutes to gather up the towels, mostly because he stops to dig his pair of slippers back out of where he’d thrown them in his closet last week, certain he wouldn’t need them again until next fall.

“Stupid window,” he shoves as many towels as he can fit around the window frame, keeping the cold air outside where it belongs. “My electric bill is going to be sky-high because of you.” He blames the window on the way he can’t seem to stop shivering too. He’d grabbed another blanket and a pair of thick socks before settling in front of the window because it felt like the apartment had dropped twenty degrees in the half hour since he turned off the heater. It’s yet to turn back on, and Chanyeol smiles at the quiet. He’ll probably crank the heater back up in a few hours when he can’t stand the cold anymore, but hopefully the rest it’s getting now will keep it from giving out on him later.

The window completely covered in towels, Chanyeol stands and makes his way back to the couch. He makes a little nest for himself out of blankets on one of the corners and climbs in with the hope that it’ll help keep him from getting hypothermia in his own damn apartment.

The dagger is sitting right where he left it, though he can’t help but notice how it looks a little brighter than it did before. Not bright blue like it was the night before, but just a little shinier, like it’s perking up, sitting at attention.

Chanyeol stares at it for a moment but leaves it alone, instead picking up his phone. It’s nearly dead, battery leeched away by the cold, but it’s got enough charge left for him to go to his weather app and check on how long this cold weather is supposed to last, how cold it must be to make his window ice over like that.

He doesn’t know what he’s expecting to see when he opens it up, but fifteen degrees is _not _it. _Fifteen_ degrees – it was _sixty _degrees yesterday. He’s not sure if that’s supposed to be physically possible. The forecast for the next week shows the temperature continuing to drop too, all the way down into the negatives.

“How cold is it going to get,” he whispers, anxiety and the cold making the tips of his fingers tingle.

His heater kicks on again, warm-ish air blasting down on him from the vent overhead. Chanyeol looks up and jerks, throws his phone across the couch with a scream as he’s startled. Partly by the heater, but mostly by the man standing at the end of his couch with a frown.

“Colder than you could ever imagine.” He’s so tall that Chanyeol has to look up to meet his eyes, a little transfixed by their strange dark color. Chanyeol tilts his head to the side because he’s pretty sure he’s seen these eyes somewhere before.

They lock eyes and the man’s face goes slack in surprise.

Then he looks from Chanyeol’s face to the broken dagger in the shoebox and back again, lips pulling back into a snarl and dark eyes widening before narrowing into slits. He throws himself forward over the end of the couch, traps Chanyeol against the arm of the couch, and roars, voice loud and furious, “_What did you do?!”_

Chanyeol bursts into tears and the man jerks back with wide eyes. Chanyeol tumbles backwards off the couch and sprints down the hall to his bedroom the second he gets his legs underneath him, screaming the whole way. He slams his bedroom door and locks the deadbolt before diving underneath his bed.

A fist pounds on his door, and then disappears. It comes again, once, twice, thrice, and then stops for a long, long time. When it returns this time, it knocks as gently as can be. Chanyeol can see the man’s feet through the crack underneath and squirms farther underneath his bed.

“Go away,” he wipes at his eyes and tries to stop the terror shaking through his limbs. The man sighs and lies down next to the door, one dark eye appearing. Chanyeol holds his breath as it scans what it can see of the room, hopes it doesn’t find him. But then it stops and focuses on him like a laser, a long-fingered hand squeezing through the crack under the door and reaching for him.

“Come out, Canlie. This is not the time to be stubborn. We both know what you did. And I understand _why _you did it, but we have to fix this before it’s too late.”

Chanyeol hiccups and curls in on himself, grabs the edge of his comforter and pulls it down so it falls down onto the floor in a heap and hides him. “I’m not Canlie! Go away!”

“What?”

***

Yifan, the name the man who is not quite a man called himself before he went to sleep so long ago, sits up and blinks in confusion as Canlie insists that he is not Canlie. But Yifan would know Canlie in any form, had recognized him the moment they locked eyes, and he knows that the man currently hiding under a bed is without a shadow of a doubt Canlie.

“J-just take whatever you want and get out,” Canlie whines, voice thick with tears in a way it had never been before. Yifan can’t remember Canlie ever crying, not even when the cold finally caught up to him, froze him so quickly Yifan didn’t have a chance to stop it.

_Yifan _had cried, but Canlie had just lied still with his head in Yifan’s lap, body having given up shivering, and drifted off with a little smile on his face. _I’m so warm now._

He had always been so stoic, heart frozen solid by the cold and loss after loss. He loved Yifan, and Yifan loved him, but Yifan can count the smiles he received from Canlie on one hand. He wasn’t like _this _Canlie, screaming and crying and yelling, emotions bright and bursting. But he was Canlie and he was perfect – _is _Canlie, _is _perfect, because Canlie is here now, just on the other side of the door.

Yifan never thought he’d ever see Canlie again.

He takes a deep breath to calm the tears that sting the backs of his eyes. Winter has been unleashed, the cold is leeching away more and more lives with every second he spends sitting on the floor, but Canlie is _here_. Canlie unleashed winter to bring Yifan back, but he is _alive_

And so Yifan starts again, trying to keep his voice level and even so he doesn’t set off Canlie’s vicious temper. “Canlie-”

“I’m not Canlie! I don’t even know who he is!” The name comes out wrong, tones off and sound slurring into _Zanlie_. “My name is Chanyeol and you – I shouldn’t have told you my name. My name is _not _Chanyeol! My name is uh…uh…Kyungsoo! My name is Kyungsoo and you need to get out of my apartment before I call the cops!”

“Chanyeol,” Yifan repeats, rolls the sounds around in his mouth. It’s not so different from Canlie, sounds like something those villages from the west would call a child. “That’s what you call yourself now? Chanyeol?” He prefers Canlie, will never think of him as anything else, but if Chanyeol is what Canlie calls himself now, Yifan will oblige him.

Lying flat on his stomach once more, Yifan looks to the large blanket Canlie had pulled down to hide himself. Canlie is peering out from the edge now. His big eyes are cautious, frightened, like a prey animal scared to leave its burrow. He squeaks like he never has before when he sees Yifan watching him and ducks hides behind the blanket again. “Come out then, _Chanyeol. _We need to clean up the mess you created before it gets any worse.”

“I-I didn’t do anything!” Even if Yifan hadn’t already seen the dagger, he would know Canlie is lying.

“Oh? Did the dagger break all on its own then? Did winter simply release itself? You’ve done something terrible and we both know it.”

Canlie shifts the blanket to the side and stares, so guilty and sad that Yifan can’t help but sympathize. Canlie _unleashed winter, _the howling, biting, _killing _force that nearly destroyed the world. But Canlie has also been stuck all alone in the sun, in a strange new world with a strange new name. He must have searched the world over to find out what happened to Yifan and gotten so desperate that he did the unthinkable just to bring his love back. If Yifan had been in his position, he thinks that he might have done the exact same.

“You know about the dagger? Like…like _know _about it?”

Yifan nods. “I know everything there is to know about that dagger. I was the one who made it, remember?”

Canlie’s jaw drops and he squirms out from underneath the bed a bit, just enough for Yifan to see his nose scrunch up in concentration when his shirt catches on something. It makes Yifan smile despite the irritation lurking in his gut.

“_You_ made it?! Can you fix it,” Canlie asks, eyes filling with something that looks like hope. Yifan can’t remember Canlie ever looking hopeful before. He resigned himself to the cold to survive, and Yifan will never fault him for that, but he finds that hope looks _beautiful_ on Canlie.

Something begins to buzz. Canlie doesn’t seem to hear it though, still wriggling out from underneath the bed even as he starts off on a ramble about the cold and an accident. Yifan turns to find a red rectangle lying on the floor nearby. “I’m sorry about the dagger! I didn’t mean to break it, honest,” Canlie says, voice pitiful and ashamed, “It just startled me and then I threw it at the wall.” He picks up the rectangle, brow furrowed in confusion, and nearly drops it when the thing vibrates in his hand.

“Earth and Skies,” he yelps, throwing the rectangle across the room to smash into the wall. It felt nothing like the pure, clean magic of the Skies and the Earth; Canlie shouldn’t be anywhere near it, shouldn’t have had something like that in the first place.

“…Like that.”

Yifan turns to see Canlie standing in the doorway, staring at the rectangle forlornly. Yifan hurries to his feet and smiles when he finds that he’s still the taller of the two. Not by much, but enough to matter.

And then his smile drops. He forces away the contentment that comes from simply being in Canlie’s space; he’ll hold it close and cherish it later, as he’s drifting into eternal sleep once more. For now, he grabs Canlie by the arm and drags him to where the dagger is lying on the floor, knocked out of the little box Canlie had had it in when Yifan lunged at him. Yifan picks up the dagger and twists it so the crack marring one side of the blade catches the light.

Canlie cringes, “I’m really, really sorry about that, it was an accident. And I didn’t know it was yours, it was just sitting in a bag on a shelf and I have bad impulse control – wait, how did you even know it was here? How the fuck did you get into my apartment in the first place?”

Yifan ignores the increasingly frantic questions being shouted in his ear, focus narrowing onto a single word. “Accident? You did this on accident?”

Canlie nods. “I wasn’t expecting it to be so cold, you know? Wasn’t expecting the metal to be so brittle either. Why would you think I’d break it on purpose?”

And Yifan is struck with the unsettling realization that Canlie truly doesn’t remember him. He might not have released Yifan on purpose, risking the world because he missed him so much. This Canlie doesn’t remember who he was before – it _is _Canlie though, Yifan can feel it in his bones. The fury Yifan had felt when he first woke, softened by the thought that Canlie, heartbroken and alone, had unleashed winter so the two of them could have just a bit more time together, comes roaring back with a vengeance.

“Earth and Skies, boy! Do you have any idea what you’ve done,” Yifan lets go of Canlie’s arm to pace across the room. He pauses, looks to where Canlie is standing, watching him with wide eyes. “You’ve unleashed winter unending! The cold that chokes out life, turns the world barren and dead and then _continues to kill!_”

He tries to calm himself with knowledge that this was the work of a moron and not some malevolent being hellbent on wiping out all life, but it’s hard to think of anything besides the snow pouring down from the skies, blocking out the sun.

“B-but winter is almost over. Spring is starting in, like, a few weeks,” Canlie stammers. “You’re being dramatic. I just broke a dagger, that’s all.”

Yifan scoffs. “You broke a dagger colder than the deepest, most ancient ice and it never _occurred _to you that you might have done something irreversible? You say winter is ending when it’s roaring outside your home, alive and well despite your supposed arrival of spring?”

“I mean, I thought I did _something _bad, but just because it was, like, expensive or something.” Canlie’s face flushes pink, tips of his ears going red as he puts his hands on his hips. “And seasons… Seasons aren’t linear, you know! Like sometimes winter starts to decline and then comes back for a bit, that’s all.” Yifan watches as Canlie’s eyes dart to the sheet of glass embedded into his wall that’s frosted over with thick, unyielding ice. His short burst of defiance wanes, shoulders starting to slump. “Eternal winter’s not – I didn’t…I-I’ll show you!”

He grabs another rectangle off a nearby table, this one black and covered in strange protrusions. Yifan shuffles forward for a closer look, intrigued as Canlie points the rectangle at a large, rectangular piece of black glass and begins to press on the protrusions.

The black glass lights up in different colors. Yifan jumps back in surprise. There are _people _trapped inside the glass, going about their lives as though they were free. Canlie doesn’t even seem to notice, too focused on pressing protrusions. The people change as he presses, lives disappearing in an instant as more take their place. It’s horrific.

“Canl – Chanyeol, put a stop to this at once,” he starts, stomach rolling in disgust. “This is deplorable! It’s inhumane! Chanyeol! Chanyeol! Canlie, _let them out!_”

Canlie pauses to look at Yifan, brows furrowed together and mouth dropped open in absolute confusion. “What the hell are you talking about? It’s a fucking TV, no one’s in there.” Canlie turns back to the thing he calls a TV and changes the people in the glass a few more times. Yifan wonders how much the world has changed while he slept to create glass that shows people in this fashion.

“Here,” Canlie says, tension in his shoulders abating as a woman appears in the glass. “Yoora’ll prove that you’re just dramatic…and fucking crazy – how did you get into my apartment?!”

Yifan starts to respond but stops as the woman as the glass begins to speak, brow furrowed in a near identical match to Canlie’s.

“It seems like Punxsutawney Phil was a little off this year. Scientists are baffled by the sudden cold front sweeping across the world. In the United States, park rangers in Death Valley report that there is currently snow on the ground and multiple countries in the southern hemisphere are reaching record low temperatures. It seems to have happened overnight, with the temperature drops starting around eight last night and continuing into the morning.” In local news, we have received roughly a foot of snow in the past twelve hours, and the storm shows no signs of stopping.”

The woman in the glass pauses to shuffle the papers in her hands and clear her throat. Yifan takes the pause to look to Canlie, heart sinking at the pale, guilty, shell-shocked expression on his face.

“All schools in the area have cancelled classes until the storm stops. Local emergency services are asking that people please try to limit their driving as much as possible, the roads are unsafe and unlikely to be cleared for safe travel any time soon. My name is Yoora Park of your local EXO morning news. Have a wonderful day and stay warm out there.”

Canlie collapses down onto the strange fabric seat he’d been on when Yifan first appeared in his home. His eyes turn red with the beginnings of tears, hands shaking even as he attempts to brace them on his thighs. Despite the fury that has yet to settle, Yifan wants to comfort him.

He wants to draw Canlie into his arms and reassure him that he will fix this mistake, seal winter into something less breakable and stop the cold before it can take what doesn’t belong to it. He drops to his knees beside him on the strange furniture.

“I-I did this,” Canlie asks, voice so quiet, so small. “This is all my fault?”

Yifan nods, a slow solemn thing, and tucks some of Canlie’s overlong hair behind his ear. Canlie never let his hair grow this long before, never wanted to worry about it falling into his face. Yifan had never pushed, but he has always secretly wanted to see Canlie with this shaggy sort of hair. It’s just as cute as he imagined it would be, emphasizing his pretty eyes and big ears.

This form of Canlie doesn’t remember Yifan or the love they shared, but Yifan does. He opens his mouth to offer his love some sort of comfort, but Canlie shoots up onto his feet and screams.

“I unleashed eternal winter!” Yifan can only watch in stunned silence as Canlie takes off a sprint, running back and forth across the room, screaming all the while. “Oh my God! I unleashed eternal winter and now everyone’s going to _die! Ah!” _He stops at the frost-covered glass and screams, stops at the rectangle mounted on his wall and screams.

The dagger in Yifan’s free hand catches Canlie’s attention and freezes, momentum sending him stumbling. He points at the dagger and shrieks, “You did this! Why did I pick you up? Why the hell do you exist?! Why were you in a fucking antique shop?!”

He starts laughing even as tears roll down his cheeks and Yifan feels utterly helpless to do anything but sit in silence. Canlie crouches, face buried in his hands. “Everyone’s going to die because I started the worst fucking ice age in history and I’ve got a strange man in my apartment who keeps calling me the wrong fucking name.”

“C-Canlie,” Yifan starts, setting the dagger on the table and crouching next to Canlie with his arms outstretched. He offers comfort, unsure if Canlie will take it. The Canlie that Yifan knows would never, but this Canlie is very, very different than the Canlie that froze to death in his arms. “We _will _fix this, but you need to calm down and come with me. The sooner we act, the better.”

“You promise you can fix this?” Yifan nods. He did it once, there is no reason he can’t do it again. Canlie wipes at his tears and sniffles, shaky, wavering trust blooming in his eyes; Yifan feels the urge to hold him again. “Okay,” he nods, “I’ll go with you.”

At the moment, the door to Canlie’s home that Yifan had unlocked with a gust of air opens once more, this time to a shorter man with eyes like one of the leopards living up in the mountains.

“Minseok,” Canlie whispers, “Oh no.”

“Chanyeol,” the words pour out in a panicked rush, “are you okay? You were late for work and didn’t answer your phone, so I rushed over to check on you. And then I hear you screaming from the elevator and your door’s unlocked and –”

The man stops short, gaze locked with Yifan’s, recognition sparking somewhere within. Then his eyes drop the table where the dagger is lying, and he pales. “Chanyeol – you – dagger – winter cold… _aah!_”


	3. Chapter 3

“So,” Minseok starts. His voice is low and sharp, cutting through the air as the man very obviously tries to keep his cool. It makes Chanyeol hang his head and kick his feet in the air like a child, stool underneath him rocking from the force. The broken dagger is lying on top of its velvet bag on the low-sitting coffee table in the lounge area shoved far, far into the back of the store between two couches Chanyeol’s never seen before.

Jongdae and Minseok are on one couch, the man who broke into his apartment on the other. Minseok and Jongdae keep calling him Yifan, and the man who broke into his apartment answers to it, but Chanyeol is wary to think of him as anything but Creep Who Broke Into My Apartment.

Chanyeol dragged a stool back from the front of the shop because he didn’t want to sit next to any of them.

“What were you doing with the dagger, Chanyeol?”

Chanyeol can feel all their eyes on him, burning into his skin, and he shrugs. “I was just trying to fix the dagger.”

There’s a beat of silence that’s broken by the deep, nasal sigh of someone who is trying very, very hard to not lose their cool. Chanyeol raises his head just a little and sees Jongdae holding tight to Minseok’s arm. “And why did the dagger need fixing, Chanyeol?”

“B-because,” he trails off, fiddling with the hem of his shirt, “because I broke it.” Minseok’s jaw tightens as he nods and Yifan just shakes his head. They’re all looking at him, but none of them will look him in the eye. Guilt slams full force into his chest and he wishes that he hadn’t tried to hide the dagger in the first place. “It was an accident though, I swear! I wouldn’t break any of your stuff on purpose.

“And I’m sorry, I’m really, really sorry.”

“If it was an accident, then why did you hide it? Why didn’t you just tell us what happened,” Jongdae asks. Minseok isn’t even looking at Chanyeol anymore, face buried in his hands as he fights back thinly-veiled rage. Jongdae’s mad at him too; his anger’s just a little more under control than Minseok’s.

They’re all so mad at him. And he understands why. He knows that he deserves their anger after all the shit he’s done in the past twenty-four hours, but it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.

Chanyeol bites his lower lip when it starts to wobble, blinks back tears when they start to burn behind his eyes. “I didn’t want you to be mad at me. I knew I shouldn’t have touched it – I don’t know why I did it, the bag was just sort of open and I saw the dagger and it was so cool that I wanted to look at it more and,” he stops for a breath, curls and uncurls his hands into fists. “But I knew that you guys would be so mad at me if you found out I broke it. Like you guys are my only friends right now and I was scared that you’d hate me and then I’d have no friends. So I thought that if I fixed it, you know, and then put it back and everything would be okay and you wouldn’t be mad. I’m so sorry, you guys. I didn’t know it would lead to all this.”

The door to the front of the shop is open, view clear straight through to the front windows. The world outside is white, snow pouring down from the sky, covering the road and piling up so high in front of doors they’d had to dig to get into the shop. If it weren’t for the fact that Minseok grew up in some bum-fuck, nowhere, backwoods town full of pick-up trucks with four-wheel drive, they wouldn’t have even made it to the shop in the first place. The icicle that had been all but melted the day before is back with a vengeance. It has friends now too, all of them lining the gutter and hanging down so low Chanyeol would smack his head on them if he walked underneath.

“God,” Minseok groans, “it’s so hard to be mad at the human embodiment of sunshine. I am mad. I am still very fucking pissed off about this, but it’s hard to be mad _at _you when I know it was an accident. Didn’t you read the sign though? Like the label we have underneath nearly every item on every shelf?”

Chanyeol shakes his head. “There was a label?” He follows Minseok’s pointing finger to the shelf where the dagger had been the night before, the empty space left behind in its absence sticking out like a sore thumb. Underneath that empty space is a label that is just as neat and just as obvious as all the others: _Do Not Touch! Extremely Fragile!_

“I’m sorry,” Chanyeol says again because it’s the only thing he can think to say. “I’m like really, really sorry.”

Minseok drums his fingers on his thighs as he looks from Chanyeol to the dagger and back again. Finally, he sighs, body slumping back against the sofa. “You’re not forgiven. I want to make that clear, you’re not forgiven and we’re going to have a very, _very_ long talk about trust and honesty once Yifan has resealed winter, but we are still your friends. God, didn’t your parents ever teach you that things are always worse when you get caught trying to hide something you did than when you confess?”

Chanyeol opens his mouth to ramble out more nonsense apologies when Jongdae leans forward in his seat with a frown. “The bag was open,” he asks.

His frown deepens when Chanyeol nods, “Just a little bit, but enough to see inside.”

“You left the bag holding the only thing powerful enough to contain winter _open_,” Yifan snarls, teeth bared as he nearly leaps to his feet.

Jongdae sneers in response. “Do you think we’re stupid? Our families have been the keepers of magic for longer than you’ve existed, we did _not _leave the bag open. I checked it myself before we left last night. That bag was pulled completely shut, just like it is every night. Winter must’ve opened the bag on its own. But winter isn’t sentient. Or at least it’s not _supposed _to be.”

Yifan’s lips press together into a thin line, obviously not satisfied with Jongdae’s answer but helpless to do anything about it. “Winter isn’t sentient, not in the way you consider sentience, at least. It, like all living things, is single-mindedly focused on survival. By any means necessary.” His eyes are sharp when he reaches out and grabs the dagger.

Chanyeol’s stomach twists uncomfortably as the metal shines, light glinting off the edge of the blade. It reminds him too much of the night before, of the moments before he threw the dagger across the room and started the whole shit-show. How badly he wanted to touch it last night, how badly he wants to touch it right now.

Even after all the trouble that stupid knife has caused, Chanyeol still wants to hold it, can’t help but think of it as one of the prettiest things he’s ever seen.

He looks up from where he’d been watching Yifan play with the dagger and jerks so hard he nearly falls off his stool when he meets Yifan’s eyes. Yifan smiles softly and tosses the dagger into the air, catching it by the blade and offering it handle-first. “I see the way you look at it. It’s calling to you, isn’t it? It called to you last night and winter took advantage of the opportunity.”

Confusion makes Chanyeol frown, pulling his eyebrows together as he stares somewhere past the strange, apartment-breaking-into man on the couch. “Why the fuck would it call to me? It’s yours.”

“I made this dagger, yes, but I made it for you, Canlie.”

“For the last time, I am _not _Canlie!” Chanyeol steps off the stool and throws up his hands in frustration. Yifan’s called him Canlie at _least _ten times. He’s not Canlie, he’s never _been _Canlie, and he will never _be _Canlie.

Chanyeol knows that Yifan is some strange, ancient being that sealed winter away tens of thousands of years ago before falling into what was supposed to have been an eternal sleep. Minseok had given him a crash course in relevant magical history in the car, Yifan interjecting once or twice to add any details that didn’t make into the history books. He knows that Yifan finally got the nerve to take on winter after the love of his life froze to death. He’s pretty sure that the love of Yifan’s life was Canlie.

And he feels _so bad_ for Yifan. Even with the breaking and entering, nasty temper, and permanent scowl, Chanyeol feels so bad for him, for what he must have gone through watching Canlie die. And then Yifan woke up because winter broke free from its prison and tracked the source of the whole mess to someone who looks _just _like Canlie. To Yifan, this time, however long it takes them to fix Chanyeol’s mistake, must feel like a chance to be with Canlie again.

But Chanyeol is _not _Canlie.

Chanyeol is not Canlie and he thinks he’ll go insane if Yifan keeps calling him that name, keeps sneaking these sad, confused glances when he thinks no one is looking. Chanyeol almost wishes he _was _Canlie, at least for a little while. Give Yifan some peace in return for sleeping away the rest of forever and cleaning up Chanyeol’s colossal mess.

Yifan sneaks another glance, lost in a world that he doesn’t remember, convinced the person he loves doesn’t remember him. He sets the dagger back down onto the table, running a finger over the snowflakes etched into the blade one last time. “Right, right, _Chanyeol_. The dagger was for Canlie, _Chanyeol _broke it.”

“Low blow,” Chanyeol whines. Guilt burns like acid in his mouth, sour and making his eyes sting with tears.

Jongdae shushes him with a vague, dismissive wave of his hand, not even bothering to look over. “Until we fix the mess you made, Yifan gets as many low blows as he wants.” Chanyeol whines again, but the sound dies in his throat when Jongdae levels him with an even, unamused stare.

He settles back on his stool like a scolded child and wonders if he should scoot over to the corner and complete the look. A warm hand squeezes around his ankle and he looks up from his lap just in time to see Minseok pulling back. He offers a wobbly smile in response.

He tries to not let the way Jongdae won’t look at him for more than a few seconds break his heart into pieces.

“You _can _fix it, right? The dagger? Because it’s pretty fucking broken. Cold must’ve finally weakened the metal after all that time.” Jongdae gingerly picks it up by the handle with one hand gestures to the massive crack running down one side of the blade with the other. “Magic is magic, but I’m not sure there’s enough room in that blade to hold a reinforcing spell and all of winter.”

“Not _all _of winter,” Yifan says, “just most. And we won’t need a reinforcing spell or any of its ridiculous ingredients. I will need only the items necessary to complete a ritual. I will need to ask the Skies and the Earth to mend the blade and renew its blessing first. But once that matter is settled, the ritual will allow me to force winter into battle and seal it away. This time for good.”

Chanyeol shrinks under the pointed words. It goes unnoticed as Minseok and Jongdae brighten up, leaning forward in their seats and bubbling out question after question.

“Contacting the Skies and the Earth? No one’s been able to figure out how to do that in a thousand years!” Jongdae grins, eyes sparkling with curiosity. “Your notes are the last surviving instructions, and those are mostly chicken-scratch and what look like doodles.”

“God, the things you must know,” Minseok sighs.

Yifan seems to preen under the attention as he answers every single question with absolute authority. “My notes? I never wrote anything about the Skies or the Earth. Calling up on them requires no instruction, just power and determination. The only time I ever wrote anything was to make lists of things… things Canlie wanted me to gather.” There’s a pause and Chanyeol just _knows _Yifan has stolen another glance at him, but he doesn’t care enough to look up from where his fingers are picking at a loose thread on his pants to catch him in the act.

He feels useless, sitting silently as Yifan begins explaining whatever rituals he has to do to stop winter again. Minseok and Jongdae are so focused, hanging on his every word. He _is _useless. They don’t need him. They’ll fix this with or without him – probably faster without him, if he’s honest.

And so Chanyeol eases off his stool and starts shuffling towards the front of the shop. He tries to be as quiet as humanly possible, just the soft _scratch-scratch_ of the soles of his shoes against the carpet that’s mostly hidden by Yifan’s voice.

“Where are you going?”

Chanyeol turns to see Yifan watching him with a little frown on his lips. Their eyes meet and Chanyeol pauses, shifting his weight from foot-to-foot uncomfortably. “It seems like y’all sort of have everything under control, so I was just going to,” Chanyeol shoves a thumb back towards the front of the shop, “just, uh, clean up front or something. I don’t think I’m really needed when it comes to this stuff.”

Yifan’s eyebrows furrow in confusion, head tilting to the side ever so slightly. Chanyeol’s honest enough to admit that it’d be really endearing on anyone else. It’s still a little endearing on Yifan anyway, a little hypnotic because Chanyeol can’t seem to break their eye contact. It’s not until Yifan looks away first and pats the space next to him on the sofa that Chanyeol remembers to breathe.

“You are most certainly needed,” Yifan says as Chanyeol settles beside him. A good half-foot of space is left between them for Jesus and Chanyeol’s sense of safety. He can feel Yifan’s eyes on him, burning a hole into the side of his head as he keeps his own eyes trained on the space between Minseok and Jongdae’s heads. “I can’t convene with the Skies and the Earth unless you’re there as well. Well, actually I could, but I wouldn’t be able to repair the dagger.”

Chanyeol’s tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip. His fingers curl and uncurl on top of his thighs as he bounces his left leg, nervous energy surging through his body like fire. Minseok and Jongdae haven’t said a word, instead looking between Yifan and Chanyeol with sharp, narrowed, hawk-focused eyes, and it makes everything feel that much more uncomfortable.

He searches for something to tip the tension in the atmosphere to something a little less suffocating. “Not going to use me as a sacrifice or anything, right,” he jokes. A moment of dead silence passes, and then another, and Chanyeol wishes he’d kept his mouth shut.

“You must not have been paying attention.” Chanyeol winces at the flat, unamused twist to Yifan’s voice. He opens his mouth to apologize, explain that it was just a joke and he’s just a moron, when Yifan continues. “I already told Minseok and Jongdae that I required your still-beating heart on a platter as an apology to the Skies and the Earth for your mistake.”

***

Yifan bites back a wince as Canlie whips his head around to stare at him, eyes growing wide and color rapidly draining from his face. It is only when Canlie asks if he’s serious, voice high and thin and shaking like a willow branch in the wind, does Yifan realize that perhaps this Canlie doesn’t remember or enjoy the jokes they used to share. Perhaps this is not the best time to make that sort of joke in the first place.

“M-m-m-my _heart? _Like out of my _chest_? I k-kind of need that to, you know, live.” Canlie’s breaths come faster and faster.

The two men sitting on the other piece of furniture Canlie refers to as a sofa look equally as horrified. Minseok is just sitting still with his mouth dropped open, Jongdae is getting to his feet and garbling out nonsense syllables of protest. “I’m sure there’s something else we can offer,” he says in a fear-hurried rush, “Chanyeol’s heart that – that’s too much. That’s just not fucking possible.”

And Yifan finds himself speechless, embarrassment sitting like an awkward, heavy weight on his tongue. Or it does until Canlie begins to cry. “You’re going to kill me,” he asks, voice no louder than a whisper.

Blue lips flash behind Yifan’s eyes. Cold, heavy limbs in his arms, limp body against his chest, his chest that moved no matter how cold it was. His chest that moved even Canlie’s didn’t. Even when he wished that it would stop moving and let him lie down next to Canlie, let the cold leech the rest of his life from his body. He’s watched Canlie die once, he can’t do it again.

The beginnings of a sob cut off as Yifan cups Canlie’s face and leans in until their noses touch. “Never, Canlie. I would never harm you. I’m sorry, it was meant to be a joke.”

And this Canlie is so much unlike the Canlie that Yifan knew before, because instead of meeting his apology with a snarl or a fist in the ribs, Canlie just gently pulls himself out Yifan’s grasp and wipes away the beginnings of his tears. “Didn’t sound like a joke to me. Sounded like you were dead fucking serious.”

“I’ve been told that my face is too severe for humor before,” Yifan offers Canlie a self-deprecating smile. Canlie huffs out a little laugh at that and the sound warms Yifan from the inside. Their eyes meet once more and Yifan is enchanted. He holds Canlie’s gaze for what feels like an eternity, lost in the brown that’s always reminded him of wood after rain, dark, heavy. Something he could stare at for hours and never lose interest.

Those are Canlie’s eyes, the prettiest brown ever imaginable. They’re even prettier now than they were before, soft, sweet, and open instead of hard and guarded. It hurts to think it, feels as though he’s betraying his memories of the Canlie he knew so well.

Yifan pulls back and clears his throat. He says nothing as Canlie inches away, puts more space between them. “I wasn’t joking when I said I needed you with me when I call upon the Skies and the Earth. You’ll need to apologize for what you did and offer the dagger up to be repaired and blessed again.”

Canlie’s mouth twists into a little upset frown, but he nods. “Yeah, I can do that. I’ve already apologized a million times, what’s one more?”

Yifan longs to comfort him, to ease that frown from his lips, but he turns to Minseok and Jongdae instead. “Time is of the essence, and so we will go at once. I assume you two will be able to gather what I will need for the sealing ritual in the meantime?”

Minseok nods as Jongdae takes the list of ingredients Yifan had written for him and strides to a large chest of drawers painted in the colors and the insignia of a coven Yifan recognizes from before he fell asleep. They’d been a good coven, pure, concerned only for the preservation of life and nature. It warms Yifan’s heart to know that Canlie is surrounded by those close enough to the coven to be allowed to bear its symbols.

Yifan stands and offers them both a bow for their service. “Then I shall leave you to your work. Come, Chanyeol, we have our own work to do.”

“Wait, what? Where are we going,” Canlie asks as he pushes himself to stand. He watches Minseok and Jongdae move about the space with wide, confused eyes.

“You need to pay more attention when others are speaking,” Yifan teases. Oh, how he wishes he could close the distance between them and press his lips to Canlie’s cheek, feel the heat of the pink blush that spreads across his face. “I must be in nature to convene with the Earth and Skies. The farther I am from man-made structures, the better. Go grab your coat.”

Yifan gently tucks the dagger back into its bag and ties the pouch to the loop of rope he always keeps around his hips. When he’s done, he looks up to see Canlie slipping into his coat, the coat he’d dug out of his own closet for Yifan held out in one hand. Yifan had tried to explain that the cold doesn’t affect him the way it does humans, but Canlie had been so obviously overwhelmed that he had shrugged the heavy fabric on to soothe Canlie’s nerves.

Now, he only folds the coat over his arm and gestures for Canlie to follow him out through a hidden door in the very back of the shop that Minseok had offered as a way for him to travel without risking any unwanted attention. Canlie follows with a confused little noise that makes Yifan fight down a smile.

He leads Canlie out through the door in a narrow passageway between buildings, snow on the ground nearly up to their ankles. Canlie shivers and his breath fogs in the air. His arms wrap around himself as he tries to hold in heat. Something about it makes Yifan’s entire body stiffen, heart clenching in his chest.

“So how are we getting to ‘nature’? The nearest place I can think of that’s not surrounded by buildings and stuff is the national park about five miles east. But the roads are too fucked to drive on anymore and I’m not sure I can walk that far,” Canlie says as he kicks at the snow around his feet.

Yifan shakes the strange discomfort away and gives Canlie a sharp-toothed grin before grabbing him by the arm and pulling him close. He wraps both his arms around Canlie’s waist and holds on as tight as he can without hurting him.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Yifan just leans in close and whispers into his ear, relishing in the way it feels to have Canlie in his arms, “You’re going to love this.” Canlie always loved this.

He takes to the skies a heartbeat later.

Canlie screams and clings to Yifan the second he realizes they’re off the ground. His cold face is pressed to Yifan’s neck. It makes Yifan sigh in contentment to have him this close. “You can _fly_,” comes Canlie’s voice, shrill and terrified and perhaps a bit awestruck.

“Yes. Flying is my primary method of travel.”

“And you didn’t think to maybe, you know, mention that before you just grabbed me and launched us both off the ground?” Canlie lets out a shuddering breath as Yifan soars higher, up past the clouds where no humans can spot them. “Would’ve really appreciated the heads-up, Yifan.”

Yifan shrugs, “I wanted to surprise you.”

“I think I’ve had enough surprises in this one day to last a lifetime,” Canlie mutters in response. Yifan smiles at the feeling of Canlie’s hair brushing against his jaw as he peers over his shoulder. “_Woah_, we’re so high up. This is safe, right? Like I’m not going to slip out of your arms and go plummeting to my death?”

The very idea of such a thing every occurring makes Yifan’s stomach churn and he nearly tightens his grip on Canlie before realizing that would only make the human believe he has a reason to worry about being dropped. “Canlie and I used to spend hours flying together and not once was there even a moment when I worried I would drop him. You are safer in my arms than you are anywhere else, Ca-Chanyeol, trust me on that.”

Canlie doesn’t respond after that, just watches the world go by over Yifan’s shoulder. His hands relax where they’d been clutching at Yifan’s clothing and Yifan can feel the moment that Canlie stops worrying and allows himself to enjoy.

He raises his head once as he shifts around to get more comfortable. They’re horizontal, Canlie a warm, welcome weight on top of Yifan. It gives Yifan a glimpse of pretty, sparkling eyes and a content smile, makes him want to slow down and give Canlie more time in the clouds. He doesn’t though, he can’t. Time is not on their side in this instance, every second they waste is one that winter uses to its full advantage.

And so Yifan brings them back to the ground sooner than he would like, careful to keep his hold on Canlie until he’s sure the human is ready to bear his own weight. There were times that Canlie’s legs would give out on him after too much time had passed in the air. Once Canlie is steady, Yifan steps back and drops to his knees in the snow.

“What are you doing?” Canlie’s arms reach out to him and then pull back in a strange jerking motion as though he wants to grab Yifan and pull him back to his feet. “Aren’t you cold?”

Yifan shakes his head. He doesn’t feel the cold at all; he isn’t meant to. “You will be, though. Put this on.” Yifan tosses Canlie the coat he had borrowed and then busies himself with freeing the dagger from its pouch.

He lays the dagger down gently onto the snow. There’s the softest of crunch as some of the snow compacts under its weight, but it disappears into the sound of the wind through the trees. Yifan looks up at the sky and frowns at the icicles clinging to the barren branches of nearly every tree surrounding them. The snow here is deep, nearly reaching Yifan’s waist as he kneels. Winter sits over the area like deadly, unforgiving weight. It makes him want to grab Canlie and bring him closer, keep him within arms’ reach so that he knows winter won’t be able to touch him. He feels acutely aware of Canlie’s every shiver, ears attuned only to the sound of his teeth chattering.

It’s distracting. It’s annoying. It’s making Yifan remember what he looked like frozen solid.

“Quiet.” Yifan hopes he doesn’t sound quite so angry to Canlie. But then Canlie flinches and he knows he does. “I need you to be quiet and still. I am going to call upon the Earth and Skies now. All you need to do is remember how sorry you for what you’ve done, how much you wish to be forgiven. I may begin to act strangely; the dagger may begin to act strangely. No matter what happens, do not attempt to get my attention. When I’m ready, I will talk to you. Am I understood?”

“U-uh-huh. Apologize with no words. Seems easy enough.”

Yifan closes his eyes. His muscles relax and his head tips backwards, baring his throat to the Skies. He pushes his hands down through the snow, down to the frozen soil, and scratches until can bury his fingertips in dirt. He lets out a slow breath and gives himself over to the energy thrumming through every living thing.

There’s never any conscious thought when talking to the Skies and the Earth. It’s mostly feelings, deep, primal, Yifan’s truest self in contact with truest form of life. There are flashes of color, hands on his cheeks. Whisperings of a mother in one ear, chatterings of a child in the other. he knows Canlie is apologizing with every fiber of being; his guilt, which runs thick and heavy and choking in a way Yifan hadn’t noticed, is almost palpable as the Earth and the Skies listen, dig down deep to see if he is truly sorry. He can feel the moment Canlie is forgiven as the guilt that had be eating him up disappears.

Yifan knows he asks for the dagger to be repaired and blessed. The wind howls, lights glow and dim behind his eyelids. Power rises up from the Earth, falls down from the Skies, and coalesces in Yifan’s chest just as it did the first time the dagger was blessed. He prepares for the power to shoot out of him and into the dagger, but then it disappears, soft sadness sinking into his bones.

The dagger is too broken. Winter had eaten away at the metal after so many centuries; it would’ve broken open eventually even without Canlie’s help. There is nothing the Earth and the Skies can do.

Yifan cannot seal winter away.


	4. Chapter 4

Chanyeol can only watch as Yifan paces the apartment, fists clenched at his sides and teeth bared. From the front door to the kitchen and back again, heavy footsteps echo through the quiet. The dagger lies on the coffee table. Yifan had thrown it there as soon as they entered the apartment and started up his pacing. He stops pacing sometimes to stare at the broken, useless thing and throw ancient curses at it.

His rage is all-consuming, fills whatever space it can, makes Chanyeol feel like he’s choking on it whenever Yifan passes by. It was even worse in the forest. When Chanyeol opened his eyes and saw that the dagger hadn’t been fixed, he’d wanted to cry. He did, a little bit, just a few tears before Yifan grabbed him by the arm and hauled him to his feet.

Yifan’s grip was too tight. Chanyeol hid in the bathroom as soon as they got back to the shop and found finger-shaped bruises forming on his upper arm. He didn’t tell Yifan, won’t. He planned on asking Jongdae or Minseok for some of the ointment he knows they keep in the first aid kit, but they were in a deep, hushed conversation with Yifan when he finally came out of the bathroom and he didn’t want to interrupt. He and Yifan left before he could ask.

The bruises ache now.

Chanyeol pulls his blanket tighter around himself, curls into a ball. The heater is on full blast because Yifan had turned the thermostat up to sixty on his first round of pacing and gotten mad at Chanyeol when he protested. But Chanyeol still feels cold.

Winter rages outside the window, weather report talking about a freak winter storm ravaging the country. The _world_. No reported deaths yet, but the power is out in cities along the east coast, there’s talk of a sudden polar vortex in the northern states, scientists struggling to explain why they didn’t see it coming. They blame climate change, or maybe a shift in the magnetic poles. They blame anything and everything.

Chanyeol sucks in a breath and tries not to cry because he knows the blame lands solely on his shoulders. The guilt had disappeared for a little while after Yifan’s ritual. It had all been sucked out of him as he apologized over and over in his head, the guilt rising up, threatening to swallow him whole, and then floating away in a heavy, shaking sigh. It felt like there was a light at the end of the tunnel; it would all be over in a few hours, so he didn’t have to feel so awful. But then he opened his eyes and saw that the dagger was still broken, realized that whatever he’d done to it had broken it so completely that not even the spirits of life could fix it, and the guilt clawed its way back into his veins.

Acidic, eating its way through him piece by piece until there’s nothing left. Terrible, awful, unrelenting guilt.

Yifan pauses in his pacing right in front of the TV, facing the coffee table and the dagger. The weatherman predicts that the high for the night will be well below freezing. Then he says that all churches have been converted into temporary homeless shelters because all the normal ones have filled up with people trying to outrun the cold. The symptoms of hypothermia are constantly running across the bottom of the screen along with instructions on how to care for frostbite.

Yifan’s hands curl into firsts. He grits his teeth so strongly Chanyeol can imagine the sound of his molars grinding together.

“I’m sorry,” Chanyeol whispers, “I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.” When tears well up, he buries his face in his knees and tries to find the words to explain that he’s not trying to get pity. They’re there, on the tip of his tongue, but his throat is too full of emotion to speak.

The couch dips with added weight. Chanyeol chances a look up from his knees and blinks as he meets Yifan’s eyes. They’re heavy with some emotion that Chanyeol can’t describe, heavy and dark and _so tired_. “I know you are. I know.” A few moments pass, “It wasn’t all your fault, not your fault at all, really.”

Chanyeol blinks in confusion, sits up a little straighter. He loses some of the heat he’d managed to generate while curled up in a ball in the process and he can’t help the little shiver that runs down his spine.

“You’re still cold.” Chanyeol’s not sure if it’s a question or a statement, so he just nods. Yifan’s entire expression changes then, rage shifting into something nervous, something terrified. “You should have said something, I would have gotten you more blankets. You need to stay warm, Canlie, I need to keep you warm.” More blankets are procured from Chanyeol’s bedroom and draped around Chanyeol’s shoulders. Yifan takes care to layer them just so, tucking them in so that Chanyeol doesn’t have to hold them.

There’s something so frantic about it all that Chanyeol doesn’t even mention that Yifan called him _Canlie_.

It’s only when Yifan begins adjusting and readjusting the three blanket layers he’s added to Chanyeol’s cocoon that he reaches out and places a hand over Yifan’s to stop him. “I’m warm now,” Chanyeol layers each word with as much sincerity and honesty as he can. “Really, I’m okay.”

And Yifan looks up from where he’s kneeling in front of the couch and meets his eyes, haunted and sad and still so unbelievably tired, “But you weren’t.”

“I know. Canlie froze to… It was hypothermia.”

Yifan nods and his gaze drifts off to the side as he remembers, “I came back to our home and the fire had gone out while he slept, blown out by the latest storm. He only woke up when I forced him to, shook him and poured as much heat into him as I could. It wasn’t enough to save him, but it woke him up. Canlie was always so brave. He faced death with one of his rare smiles and only said that he finally felt warm. My beautiful Canlie.” Yifan’s eyes turn misty for a moment before his face smooths out into a mask. “And then I took his dagger and sealed winter away and I went into the mountains to sleep for eternity.”

Chanyeol’s heart aches for him. He wonders how long since Canlie died that Yifan went to sleep, if Yifan had given himself any time at all to grieve. If Yifan agreed to sleep for eternity since it would mean he’d escape the pain of missing Canlie.

“I know I’ve said it before, but I’m sorry for breaking the dagger and unleashing winter and basically undoing all the work you did to save the world,” he stumbles and trips over his words, uncomfortable underneath the heavy, solemn atmosphere.

A shake of his head, and then Yifan pulls himself back up onto the couch. Chanyeol watches as he takes the TV remote and shuts off the opening theme to the sitcom that always plays after the evening news. He offers Chanyeol a small smile, “The Earth and the Skies showed me that we were wrong in blaming you. Perhaps not Minseok and Jongdae, because you did betray their trust, but _I_ was wrong.”

“What do you mean,” Chanyeol asks.

“It wasn’t all your fault,” Yifan says so matter-of-factly that Chanyeol almost can’t believe that he’s the same person who showed up in his apartment this morning screaming at him about the horrific atrocities he’d committed by breaking the dagger. “The metal of the dagger was strong, I forged it myself so I can vouch for its quality, but winter was stronger. Cold is an insidious thing, you know. It burrows into the all weak spots of any creature or material, turns it brittle and fragile.”

“Fragile enough to break when thrown at a wall by a moron with bad impulse control?” Chanyeol nudges his shoulder against Yifan’s and smiles.

“Fragile enough that it would likely have broken on its own within a year’s time. No magically drawn human necessary,” Yifan says with a tone that almost sounds amused. “It truly wasn’t your fault. The dagger was enchanted to be drawn to Canlie, and Canlie to it. The enchantment likely passed onto you and winter took advantage of the opportunity. And the dagger was going to break eventually regardless of your actions.”

Chanyeol stares at Yifan’s face, searching for some sign that he’s being lied to. All he finds is a handsome face and a gentle, genuine smile. He wants _so badly _to believe Yifan, but the guilt clings, tells him that no matter what anyone says he is the reason winter was unleashed _now_. It tells him he might be the reason dagger is so broken that Earth and Skies couldn’t fix it.

But when he says this because he has no control over his mouth, Yifan shakes his head. “As I said before, winter turned the dagger weak and brittle. That sort of elemental magic is irreversible. Listen to _my_ voice, not the one inside your head.”

“Do you read minds now,” Chanyeol asks jokingly.

“No, but Canlie would, on occasion, only in the dead of night when he was too tired to stop himself, tell me about the voice in his head and how it would tell him awful things about himself. I can only assume that you are the same way.”

Chanyeol swallows and looks straight ahead, uncomfortable with how easily Yifan sees right through him. He’s _not _Canlie, but he thinks that there is a very good chance that he used to be. And he feels irrationally guilty that he’s not anymore; not because he doesn’t want to be himself, but because he thinks that maybe he’d be okay with being Canlie for a few days if it eased some of the pain in Yifan’s eyes.

But he’s pretty sure saying that out loud would make things awkward and only break Yifan’s heart even more, so he shoves the thoughts into the back of his mind and tries to grasp at some other topic.

“So,” he starts after a few moments of easy silence, like watching clouds drift across the sky, “what do we do now? The dagger’s fucked, but are there any other ancient artifacts hanging around in the shop that you could use?”

Yifan sighs, “You weren’t paying attention to my conversation with Minseok and Jongdae at all, were you?”

Chanyeol shakes his head. He’d been so deep in his own head that he hadn’t heard a word anyone else said until Yifan stood and said it was time for them to return to Chanyeol’s apartment. “I didn’t really think it mattered if I was listening or not, to be honest. I’m not very useful anymore now that my apology has been accepted, am I? No superpowers or arsenal of artifacts or, like, any knowledge of magic in general.”

Chanyeol tries to jerk away as his ear is gently tugged, Yifan’s mouth curled down into a frown. He yelps and grabs Yifan’s wrist when his ear is tugged again. “Ow! Stop it!”

“Stop speaking so poorly of yourself. I am no fool, Chanyeol, I know that when someone says that they don’t think it matters if they do something it often means that they do not think that _they _mater. And you matter to m-” Yifan pauses and clears his throat. “All creatures matter, useful or not.” Chanyeol’s ear is given one last tug and then lets go, frown still in place even as the look of narrow-eyed displeasure fades. “But yes, Minseok, Jongdae, and I have formulated a plan.”

***

“Minseok and Jongdae are going to look for a new vessel that follows the rules the Earth and Skies gave to me when I last spoke with them. The rules are modeled after the dagger, so they are arbitrary and infuriating, but one does not argue with the Earth and the Skies.” Canlie giggles then and Yifan feels himself soften, lips ticking upwards. It had been difficult to maintain any sort of frown with Canlie near in the past, it is even harder with the way Canlie is constantly smiling or laughing.

For a moment, Yifan wishes to reach out and touch, to trace the shape of Canlie’s smile with his fingertips. Instead, he reaches out and makes as though he’s going to grab Canlie’s ear again, which makes Canlie twist away and earns him another laugh.

“First, the item must be related to winter itself through some sort of symbol. Canlie’s dagger had snowflakes, but anything that is even tangentially related to winter should do. Second, it should matter to the person who wishes to seal winter away. Though I no longer have any worldly possessions with which to seal winter, I should be able to wield any item Jongdae or Minseok find once it is blessed by the Earth and the Skies. Once they find a vessel, they will come here and I will transport all of us to the forest have the vessel blessed and seal winter away once more.”

“And then everything’s back to normal,” Canlie asks. Yifan nods and Canlie’s eyes squish as he smiles. “I’ll be glad when spring is back. It’s on its way, you know that? I think you’ll love it.”

Yifan leans back into the cushions with a smile of his own. He imagines the sun peaking through the clouds after winter disappears into a vessel, animals crawling out from where they’d hidden to embrace its light. He imagines how the warmth would feel on his face. Flowers blooming, trees with leaves growing full and green. Canlie running under the rays of the sun, free without layers and layers of fabric.

For a moment, tears well in Yifan’s eyes and he shuts them. He lets the sadness pass over him like a wave breaking on the shore. “I’m sure I would.”

He can almost feel the moment Canlie realizes his mistake, choking on air as he stammers out an apology. “I-I didn’t – oh my God, Yifan, I’m sorry. That was – I wasn’t thinking.” Yifan waves the apology away with a hand but Canlie continues on and on. When Yifan cracks his eyes open, he can’t help but smile to himself at the way Canlie is staring at him so earnestly.

It makes him want to reach over and draw him in for a kiss, curl his fingers in Canlie’s hair the way he used to love. He interrupts Canlie’s ramblings instead. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, so tired of hearing Canlie apologize for things out of his control, so tired of being angry. He doesn’t want to be angry at Canlie anymore, not when their time together is so limited. He knows this Canlie doesn’t remember loving him, he’s finally, truly accepted it, but it doesn’t mean he can’t love him anyway. Doesn’t mean he can’t ask this Canlie to fulfill his deepest wish. “Tell me what it’s like to be under the sun. Tell me what you do in spring and summer.”

Canlie being able to live under the light of the sun, to live in a world safe from the cold – it’s all Yifan has ever wanted.

Canlie blinks once, twice, then nods. “Spring is beautiful. It’s like the entire world comes to life in just a few weeks. It’s usually, like, raining _all _the time, but that just means flowers are going to grow really well. Means there’s lots of rainbows too, which are always really pretty. And all the trees get their leaves back and it’s all bright green. It’s just so _colorful_, like a rainbow on the ground to match the sky. That sounded so stupid” Canlie laughs at himself, cheeks coloring light pink. Yifan laughs along.

“But I like to garden in the spring. When I was little I’d help my parents plant flowers and tend to the berry plants. Growing our own food was a really big thing when I was little, my mom wanted to make sure Yoora and I ate vegetables without pesticides. I’d really like to start gardening again someday,” Canlie sighs wistfully, “but I’d have to have a house with a yard to garden in first… Springs just a really, really nice season. Sort of like nature’s had all winter to rest so it can come back in full force.”

Yifan wonders what that first spring after he fell asleep was like. If what Canlie thinks is real, then it must’ve been the most beautiful spring to have ever existed after years and years of rest. Life bursting at the seams in a dazzling array of colors.

Canlie continues to describe spring, painting vivid pictures with words. It’s all for Yifan’s benefit, that much is obvious in the way he never looks away, eyes focused on Yifan’s face. He speaks with his hands too, constantly in motion. Canlie has always been a creature in motion. Not even the coldest winter nights could stop that.

Canlie didn’t stop moving until he died.

Yifan shoves that thought and the memories it brings to the side and basks in the cadence of Canlie’s voice. He speaks too quickly for his own good; he runs out of air in the middle of words and has to suck in another lungful to keep going. It’s endearing and Yifan can feel his heart twist at each pause and soft gasp. He isn’t sure he’s ever felt this at peace before, not even with Canlie before. The lack of silence, the warmth that Canlie radiates, it’s everything he needed but never wanted to ask for.

And so when Canlie finally runs out of words about spring, Yifan gives him only a moment of rest before asking, “And summer?”

Canlie smiles so widely Yifan’s cheeks ache in sympathy. “_Swimming!_ I swim like every single day during the summer! There’s a pool a few blocks away that I’ve got a membership to and I like to go in the mornings and just swim laps. I’m a really good swimmer, actually. Can you swim? I mean, probably, because you’re like a God.”

Yifan shakes his head. “I never learned to swim. I never had the opportunity nor the inclination. Water is very, very dangerous when it’s cold out. I watched a human fall in a lake once, when I was newly formed and hadn’t yet met Canlie, they stepped out onto what seemed like thick, safe ice and fell right through.” He pauses, remembering the way the ice cracked under the human’s feet. It had been so sudden; the rest of the lake had been frozen solid, all but that one patch of ice perfectly safe. The human had only had time to let out a short scream before they went under. “I tried to save them, to warm them once I’d pulled them from the water. But water that cold can send a creature into shock. It stopped the human’s heart before I could run across the ice towards them.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” Yifan hums. “So no, I do not know how to swim, but if I had the chance, I think I would love to learn.”

“Do you,” Canlie starts and stops for a moment. He shifts in place and fidgets with the edge of one of his blankets. Yifan watches how he digs his teeth into his lower lip with a single-minded focus, ensnared by the sight like a magpie with a coin.

Then Canlie’s lip pulls free and Yifan looks up to see he’s been caught staring. Canlie’s entire face is red but Yifan can’t bring himself to feel even a bit embarrassed. Canlie has always been so captivating, so beautiful. He has always hated being stared at though, always so embarrassed of the way Yifan can hardly bring himself to take his eyes off his face for more than a moment. This Canlie is no different, but Yifan hopes that he’ll begrudge him these few days to look as much as he likes.

Yifan grins as Canlie clears his throat, “D-do you think that you’ll have to go back to sleep? You know, since the dagger’s broken? Things might be different this time, you know. You already slept for so long.”

Yifan mulls the words over, not because he needs to think about them – the Earth and the Skies made it very clear that the rules from centuries ago still apply. But he lets Canlie’s words sink in because he loves the idea of it, of getting to watch the sun reclaim its place in the sky and coax the snow and ice to melt. It’s a beautiful dream.

But a dream is all it is, all it ever will be. He shakes his head. “I chose my fate long ago, Chanyeol. If winter sleeps, then I must as well. There is nothing I nor anyone else can do to change that.”

Canlie shakes his head, props his face up with a hand on his cheek. It makes the softness there squish and Yifan burns the moment into his memory.

The Canlie Yifan knew was so, so skinny, he barely had enough fat on his body to stay alive. Yifan wants to kiss the softness of Canlie’s belly he felt when picking the man up to fly them to the forest, wants to pinch his squishy cheeks. He wants to curl around him and sleep soundly knowing that he’s well-fed and healthy. He doesn’t think Canlie would appreciate any of that, though, and so he settles for his own imagination.

“I don’t think I could do that,” Canlie says after a moment, “Sleep away eternity, I mean. Like you sacrificed _everything _for the world.”

Yifan leans forward and lays a hand atop the one Chanyeol has picking at the fabric of his blankets. “I had already lost everything. When I first went to sleep, I had nothing left to live for. Canlie had died and I wanted to honor his memory, stop the cold before it snuffed out more and more lives. And then I woke and found you here.”

Canlie frowns for a moment but Yifan powers on. “You’re – I know you aren’t Canlie anymore, but you were. You are all that is left of Canlie and you grew up in the sun. You grew up in a world of light and warmth. You have lived not knowing the cold like he did, and I would give anything for you to live out the rest of your life without the knowledge.” Yifan blinks away tears, chest pulling tight. “I sacrificed everything for the world in a fit of heartbroken despair. When I learned that I would have to sleep away the centuries, I wasn’t upset. I _wanted _to sleep. I couldn’t miss Canlie if I slept. But now that you are here…”

“Do you want to sleep now,” Canlie asks. He stares at Yifan with big eyes so full of emotion, things that Yifan can’t even begin to decipher flashing across his face. Discomfort, despair, sympathy, pity, confusion, anticipation, something that looks close to _hope_, Yifan watches them all blend together in Canlie’s eyes.

And then he smiles, because he isn’t sure if the Canlie he knew ever showed him so much emotion, ever gave him the privilege to see the feelings the human loved to hide away.

“No, I do not wish to sleep, not for eternity,” he answers, voice hushed.

“But you will?” Yifan nods. “Why? Why would you do something like this if you didn’t want to? Th-the good of the world, I know, but… But why?”

“As I watched the sun begin to rise as I fell asleep, I understood its importance, _life’s _importance. But now, the good of the world is second to you.” Canlie’s mouth drops open even though Yifan knows that he must have expected that sort of answer at least somewhat. “I do not wish to sleep, but I will because it means that you will be able to continue living under the sun, watching flowers grow, swimming.

“I will sleep because I will do _anything _for you.”

“I’m not Canlie,” Canlie whispers. His voice breaks and tears fall down his cheeks. “I’m sorry. I’m _so _sorry that I’m not, but I’m not Canlie and I never will be.”

Yifan wipes Chanyeol’s tears away with his thumb and smiles when he doesn’t flinch away. “Don’t be sorry. I know that you are not Canlie, but I would still do anything for you. I love you because I know you, I know your soul, and that does not change no matter who you are. You are Chanyeol, and I love you still.”

Chanyeol melts then, a little smile breaking across his lips. “That’s the first time you’ve said my name and didn’t sound like you wanted to call me Canlie instead. And I don’t…I don’t love you back. I just met you today so I literally _can’t _love you back, but – friends? Maybe?”

“I would be honored to be your friend, Chanyeol.” They share a smile and Yifan notices that he’s been holding Chanyeol’s hand for quite a long while. But he doesn’t say anything, just keeps his hand where it is and lets himself enjoy this moment.

The wind howls outside, winter screaming its song of death across the world. But here, within the four walls of Chanyeol’s home, Yifan can only feel the warmth of Chanyeol’s hand in his own. Winter cannot reach them here.

And then all the lights in Chanyeol’s apartment go out, heater ceasing its constant hum.

“Oh fuck,” Yifan looks over to see Chanyeol’s eyes widen in fear, body tensing as he draws the blankets tighter around himself. “The power’s out.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Are you sure you’re alright,” Yifan asks as he shoves a rolled-up towel against the bottom of the bedroom door. Chanyeol sits in the middle of the bed, nearly smothered in blankets, and nods.

Yifan wonders if he had overreacted to the sudden loss of electricity to Chanyeol’s apartment, but then decides he did not. The red liquid in the strange tube on Chanyeol’s bedroom wall has all coalesced down at the bottom, under the marker for zero degrees. Yifan does not feel the cold, not the way humans do, the way Chanyeol does, but even he knows that below zero degrees is _freezing_. And the idea of Chanyeol freezing makes Yifan’s stomach turn.

Jongdae and Minseok sent a message to Chanyeol through Jongdae’s phone that they were alright. Yifan had admitted to breaking Chanyeol’s phone when Minseok brought up the issue of communicating when they found a possible vessel, and Jongdae had been kind enough to lend Chanyeol his phone granted Yifan isn’t allowed anywhere near it.

Yifan still doesn’t quite trust the rectangle Chanyeol has hidden within his nest of blankets.

Minseok and Jongdae come from a long line of caretakers of magic items. Yifan wouldn’t be surprised if he knew their ancestors; they look almost disturbingly similar to Xiumin and Chen, ancient, powerful magic-wielders. He didn’t know them well, but he can remember their faces. Jongdae’s electric smile and Minseok’s cold, impassive frown remind him of something he’s seen before, watched through snow-covered branches.

Regardless, Minseok and Jongdae have an arsenal of artifacts charmed to protect sensitive human skin from the cold. They are perfectly safe, holed up in their home with self-warming blankets and coats spelled to block out the wind.

Chanyeol has only whatever body heat his nest of blankets is able to trap. It makes Yifan nervous, has him barricading the windows and doors with towels, has him wrapping more blankets around Chanyeol despite the human swearing that he’s fine. The cold is an insidious thing, a silent infection that doesn’t show its most lethal symptoms until the very end. Chanyeol may say that he’s fine now, but Yifan refuses to take any chances now that what little sunlight that had managed to sneak through the clouds is fading.

“I’m _fine_, Yifan. Really,” Chanyeol swears, promises, protests as Yifan continues fortifying the room for a night in the cold. “At least let me help you set everything up.” He shifts and the blankets around him begin to come unwound.

Yifan climbs up onto the bed and hurries to tuck them back into place. When Chanyeol grumbles, lips turning down in a frown, Yifan meets his eyes and holds his gaze. “Please, Chanyeol, allow me to do this. If not for your sake, then for my own. I’ve watched you freeze once already, don’t make me do it again.”

And Chanyeol gives, settles back into the blankets with a soft grumble. His eyes soften and his lips part on a sad little sigh. Yifan can’t help but let his gaze drop to it, focus in on the way Chanyeol’s lower lip sticks out in the slightest hint of a pout.

Yifan can’t remember ever wanting to kiss someone so badly in his entire existence.

He crawls back off the bed, away from Chanyeol and the longing to press their lips together, and lights every candle Chanyeol owns. The soft light illuminates the room enough for Chanyeol to see as the night grows darker. Yifan sets a few of the smaller, less dangerous candles on the wooden stands by the bed to make it easier. Moonlight shines in through the windows, lighting the carpet up in silver-blue. The snowflakes cast shadows as they fall from the sky.

“It’s beautiful,” Chanyeol says as Yifan settles at the foot of the bed. “I mean, it would be if it wasn’t the apocalypse.”

Yifan can’t help but laugh. He always thought of it is a horrid, ugly thing, white like death, snowflakes falling down from the sky to choke out life. But here and now, with Chanyeol’s voice sounding so soft and full of awe, the voice of someone who has only known winter as one of four seasons that come and go as nature wills, he thinks he can understand that this is what winter is meant to be – beautiful.

Time passes. The candles begin to burn down as the moon makes its journey across the sky.

Yifan sits quietly and feels the temperature drop around him. The snow falls and falls, quickly turning into ice as it pours down from the sky. He listens as it hits the windows. Chanyeol flinches whenever a particularly large bit hits the glass and Yifan wants to go to him, push himself under the blankets and hold Chanyeol tight. It’s all he wants, to love Chanyeol as completely as he possibly can. But Chanyeol wishes for them to be _friends_, and Yifan will respect that wish.

At least until Chanyeol begins to shiver even under his layers and layers of blankets.

Chanyeol lies down and curls up and Yifan thinks it’s because he’s tired and wanting to sleep. Canlie used to sleep splayed out, but Chanyeol is not Canlie and so Yifan is ready to believe that Chanyeol prefers to sleep curled up into a little ball. It would make sense; it would be cute, and nearly everything Yifan has learned about Chanyeol so far is that he is _cute_. So he thinks nothing of it. He stays where he’s settled at the foot of the bed and prepares to keep watch for the rest of the night.

Then, Chanyeol’s breaths begin to stutter, shudder, teeth clicking against each other so loudly in the silence. “Chanyeol,” Yifan turns, muscles tensing, stomach clenching, heart picking up speed. Now that Yifan is paying attention he can feel each shiver through the mattress – he _curses _himself for not noticing it earlier. “Are you alright?”

“I-I’m f-f-fi-” Chanyeol shivers so hard he can hardly get the words out. His voice is so small as he curls in tighter, only his hair sticking out of the blankets. “N-n-n-n-no…I’m c-c-cold. I’m really cold.”

Yifan is scrambling up the bed before he can stop himself. He shoves his hand into the opening of the blanket nest without thinking, cupping Chanyeol’s cheek and hissing at the cold. Chanyeol sighs, presses his face into the touch, and Yifan can’t decide whether he loves it or hates it. He settles somewhere in the middle and starts pulling at the useless blankets. “Why didn’t you say anything before,” Yifan hisses out.

“D-d-didn’t want to b-bother you.” Chanyeol is peering up at him from the blanket with those big, beautiful brown eyes, so innocent and sweet and Yifan has to suck in a few deep breaths to keep calm.

“Stupid boy,” he slides into the blankets beside Chanyeol, ignoring the confused little noise the human makes as he’s pulled into Yifan’s arms. “So, so stupid. What did I say about not wanting to watch you freeze to death again, hm? Why have ears so large if you’re not going to use them to listen?”

Chanyeol wiggles and squirms until he can slap his hands over those ears, bright red from the cold and what Yifan thinks is embarrassment. “Hey! D-don’t make fun of m-m-m-my ears!” Yifan doesn’t say anything, just shifts his hold on Chanyeol and tugs him closer. “You’re so warm,” Chanyeol sighs. “How are you so warm?” The human’s cold nose is pressed against his neck; Chanyeol melts into his arms, hands coming down to be shoved between their bodies to keep them safe from the cold.

“Magic.” Yifan’s proud of how steady he managed to keep his voice, especially considering how fast his heart is beating at having Chanyeol close. “Most things humans do not understand can be explained by magic.”

“Like why I look just like your dead lover,” Chanyeol says with light tone, voice sleepy but obviously joking. A moment passes, and then, “Sorry, shit, that wasn’t funny. God, it wasn’t even funny in my head. I’m really sorry please just blame it on the cold and being tired.”

Yifan’s chest aches with loss. Canlie was much, much more than just a _lover_. Canlie was his soulmate, the one soul in all existence he would ever truly be able to love. _Chanyeol_ is his soulmate. Canlie was supposed to be his soulmate, was still someone Yifan loved so, so much. Yifan will _always _love Canlie. But Canlie had been hardened by the cold, had the sunshine, the _life, _that shines out of Chanyeol with every movement sucked out.

Chanyeol is his soulmate. Chanyeol is everything he’s ever wanted. He meets Yifan smile for smile, laugh for laugh, keeps his heart open for the world to see. Yifan has only known him for a scant few hours, but he loves him. He _loves _Chanyeol. Not because he used to be Canlie, not because he and Canlie share the same soul, but because he is _Chanyeol_.

And he thinks that if they had the time, just a few more days, Chanyeol would love him as well. He wants to kiss Chanyeol, wants to hold him like this every single night, press their bodies together if only to have him close. Yifan wants to tell him this. He wants to tell him that he is what Yifan has been searching for, the gap between Yifan and Canlie that could never be crossed no matter how hard they tried. He wants to tell him that he is the sun and Yifan has been hopelessly pulled into his orbit. Mostly, Yifan wants to tell Chanyeol that he loves him again.

He cannot say that, though, so he says, “Yes. I believe magic can explain that as well.”

“I’m really sorry.” Chanyeol’s sentence tapers off. His back shifts under Yifan’s hands as he breathes deep and even. When Yifan pulls back to get a good look at the human, he can see how Chanyeol’s eyelids are fluttering as he fights sleep.

“Do not apologize. Sleep. I’ll keep you safe through the night.” Chanyeol’s body warms in Yifan’s arms and he can see how hard Chanyeol has to fight to stay awake. He shakes his head when Yifan urges him to let himself slip into dreams once more. So stubborn, so headstrong, only matched by Yifan himself, Chanyeol refuses to sleep, instead wrapping his arms around Yifan and tucking in closer to Yifan’s chest.

But night has fallen, and he is warm and safe. There is only so much one can do against the pull of sleep at that point.

“You’re a good snuggler,” he murmurs. “I’m so warm.” Chanyeol tries to say more, but his words slur together as he finally gives in to exhaustion that he’s been wearing since they returned from calling upon the Earth and the Skies. His body goes slack in Yifan’s arms, mouth falling open just a bit and warm breaths of air puffing against Yifan’s collarbones.

Chanyeol is warm and safe in his arms; there is only so much he can do against the pull of his heart at that point.

When Yifan is certain that Chanyeol is so deep in sleep that he will not wake, he allows himself one single kiss to Chanyeol’s forehead.

***

Chanyeol feels lips press against his forehead, soft, warm, a little dry. He smiles and finally gives into sleep.

***

Chanyeol wakes to something buzzing against his thigh. “Go ‘way,” he groans at the sensation and kicks his leg until it goes away, trying to drop back into a dream of summer sun, of running down the beach into the ocean as he drags someone else with him. He chases it behind his eyes, buries his face into his nice, warm, firm pillow, and tries to let go of consciousness, but the harder he grasps at his dream, the more it dissolves into memories of memories, strings of feelings.

Eventually, he gives up and resigns himself to being awake. He tries to roll over and stretch himself the rest of the way into consciousness, but he’s held fast by two warm, heavy weights across his back.

“What,” he grumbles and tries to blink his eyes open. It’s too bright though, even the muted light in the bedroom hurting his eyes. He shoves his face back into his pillow with a little huff. “Too fucking bright, turn the lights off.”

And then his pillow grumbles back.

Chanyeol’s eyes open wide. He hasn’t had another living creature in his bed since college – which he realizes is actually really sad, but he shoves the thought off to the side to deal with it later, after he’s dealt with the thing he’s currently using as a pillow. A million possibilities run through his mind, though most of them make no sense because he still feels like he’s half-asleep. He cranes his head to look up and freezes.

The night before comes back to Chanyeol in flashes. Yifan saying that he loves Chanyeol for Chanyeol, and not because he’s got Canlie’s face. The power going out. Being so cold he couldn’t stop shivering no matter how hard he tried. Yifan crawling into the blanket burrito so he didn’t die of hypothermia overnight. Yifan holding him as he fell asleep.

Yifan’s face is inches away from his own, so close that Chanyeol can count his eyelashes. He doesn’t, because that would be weird, but he could if he wanted to.

Yifan is still obviously asleep, chest rising and falling under Chanyeol’s face, but his grip on Chanyeol’s sides is tight. They’re pressed together so closely from the chest down. One of Yifan’s knees is shoved between Chanyeol’s thighs; if he sat up he’d be straddling him. He feels his face grow hot. Part of him wants to yank out of Yifan’s hold, but a much larger, louder part likes the warmth, likes being so close. It’s been so long since he’s been held like this, even longer since he’s been held by someone who wants to hold _him. _He shifts his body further up the bed, weight braced on his elbows on either side of Yifan’s head as he tries to pick apart the knotted mess of emotions ricocheting around his chest.

Like this, Yifan is so handsome. He’s always been handsome. Chanyeol’s been blatantly, painfully aware of that since they first met the morning before. Literally anyone with eyes would think Yifan is attractive though, it’s impossible not to. There’s nothing _weird _about the way Chanyeol feels like all the air is knocked out of his lungs every time Yifan smiles at him.

But this close, with Yifan’s warm breath hitting his face, Chanyeol’s heart races in his chest. He told Yifan he just wanted them to be friends just a few hours ago. But now he’s not sure if he really meant it.

It’s too much to think about. He doesn’t have to think about it all. Everything is strange and just as it should be all at once and his world has been turned upside down and put back in place.

“I blame you for this,” he whispers, scowling as best he can at Yifan’s sleeping face. If it had just been some sort of angry, vengeful God coming down from the mountain to beat his ass for accidently dooming the entire world, then maybe Chanyeol could handle this. If it had been all business and angry screaming, then it would be just like any other folk story of some moron messing with the laws of nature. Chanyeol could go sit somewhere and process all the crazy magic he’s seen in the past twenty-four hours.

But Yifan is – he’s _Yifan_ and Chanyeol is the reincarnation of the love of his life. When that was the deal, it was easy to shove any weird, fluttering feelings off to the side to stagnate and die. But then Yifan says he loves Chanyeol as he is, Canlie or not, and Chanyeol can’t handle that. He can’t compartmentalize the way Yifan looks at him, the way Yifan holds him.

Nothing makes any goddamn sense anymore and a horrible, despicable, needs-to-be-drowned part of him is perfectly with nothing making sense if the nonsense is because of Yifan.

He's not supposed to feel this way. He's _not_. It's been literally less than a day since he met Yifan. He's not supposed to feel this way about him, to want to be close to him, to want to lean down and close the distance between their lips. "This is all your fault," Chanyeol says again, "All your fault."

"And what, exactly, have I done to earn this blame?" Chanyeol freezes in place as Yifan's eyes open. He tries to shove himself back, put a bit of space between them, and knocks himself off balance instead. He crashes down onto Yifan's chest and brings them nearly nose-to-nose.

Yifan chuckles. Chanyeol's face heats up, spreads out to his ears. He sees Yifan's gaze dart to the side of his head and back, little smile pulling at the corners of Yifan's mouth. Just the sight of it makes Chanyeol's heart skip a beat.

"I'm not sure. But you've definitely done something."

Yifan laughs harder. "Oh, I'm sure. If you say I've done something than it simply _must _be true," he teases, eyes crinkling up as he smiles with his entire face. It's so different from the Yifan Chanyeol met the previous morning, like someone came in and switched him out for a clone while they were sleeping. "I can assure you that I am myself, Chanyeol. Only one of us can be a double."

"Did I say that out loud," Chanyeol asks. Yifan nods and Chanyeol groans. "Also, that was a horrible joke. Zero out of ten, would not hear again."

He can feel Yifan's shoulders shrug, hands on his sides smoothing out the wrinkles in his pajama shirt, "I thought it was very funny. Comedy is like beauty, isn't it? Eye of the beholder and all."

It's then that Chanyeol realizes two things. The first is that they're still cuddling. The second is that Yifan is an _excellent _cuddler, warm, strong, apparently perfectly comfortable under Chanyeol's not insubstantial weight. Which makes sense, considering Yifan is a supernatural being that can _fly. _But still, it's rare that Chanyeol gets to be the cuddled, even rarer that he gets to _enjoy _being the cuddled without the cuddler whining that he's too big or too heavy or needs to stop wiggling around.

One of Yifan's hands drifts from Chanyeol's side and starts rubbing circles in the middle of his back, nails scratching just enough to make him want to flop down and stretch like a big, lazy cat.

"Did you sleep well?"

"Mhmm," Chanyeol mumbles, squirming down the bed until he can rest his head on Yifan's shoulder, "Super warm the whole night. It was like sleeping next to a bear or something."

"A bear," Yifan repeats. Chanyeol nods. "I don't think I've ever been compared to a bear before.” He shrugs and curls in closer, a shiver working down his spine at how nice Yifan’s hand on his back feels. "Are you falling asleep again, Chanyeol?" Yifan's voice is soft, amused, and Chanyeol smiles as he nods.

"I'm still a little tired. Yesterday was a long day yesterday... That didn't make any sense." Yifan's laughter rumbles in his ears. It's so comfortable, everything is just so, so comfortable. It almost makes Chanyeol forget about winter raging outside, the literal apocalypse that _he_ started. That jerks him out of his half-sleep and he tries to push himself to sit up.

When Yifan holds him still, he struggles, whining. Jongdae and Minseok are the ones looking for a new vessel, but there has to be _something _he can do. Something more than laying in bed with Yifan, pretending like the world isn't going to shit. "Let me up, Yifan. I need to check the phone."

"I'm trying to let you up," he says, "but you need to be careful. I don't want you to get cold." Even as Yifan warns him, Chanyeol throws his arms out of the blankets in search of the phone and hisses at the rush of cold air that blows into the sudden free space under the blankets.

He hisses again when Yifan grabs him by the arms, fingers pressing into the bruises Yifan left behind the day before.

Yifan is sitting up a second later. Chanyeol almost goes tumbling off the bed, would've if it wasn't for Yifan's arm still around his waist. "Are you alright," Yifan shoves up the sleeves of Chanyeol's pajama shirt. He finds the finger-shaped bruises before Chanyeol can even start to answer.

He watches as Yifan's face drops, eyes growing wide as he gasps. "Did I," he trails off. Long fingers are laid on top of the bruises so, so gently, and Chanyeol thinks he can see Yifan's heart break when it becomes so, so obvious that the marks belong to him. "Why didn't you say anything? That I was hurting you? That I _had_ hurt you?"

"Y-you were really stressed out. And mad and stuff. I didn't want to bother you. It's just bruises, you know, nothing serious." Chanyeol doesn't fight Yifan when he goes to push up Chanyeol's other sleeve.

Yifan's eyes narrow into something dangerous, glinting in the low light. He doesn’t remind Chanyeol of a bear anymore; it’s like being stared down by a lion. "Anything that causes you pain is serious. If I – if _anyone _hurts you, you say something. Even if it is only to scream at them, you say something. Am I understood?”

Chanyeol doesn’t have the brain power to do anything but nod dumbly. He stares at Yifan with goldfish wide eyes and tries to force some thoughts together into something coherent, some argument about why the apocalypse is a _little _more important than some bruises that will heal in a week or two, but then Yifan is dipping his head to press his lips against Chanyeol’s arms and his brain goes absolutely, utterly blank.

He can’t describe the feeling. It’s not like the ache is being sucked out of him or disappearing up into the air in a flurry of glitter. But when Yifan presses his lips to a dark purple-blue fingerprint, the ache is gone. Like it was never even there in the first place.

Chanyeol closes his eyes to to five fingerprints and opens his them to four.

His heart thunders, stomach does backflips. His lungs do a funny little thing that makes it so he can’t really breathe anymore. He just sucks in tiny little gasps of air and hopes he doesn’t pass out.

Yifan moves from one bruise to the next; he doesn’t even notice Chanyeol losing his metaphorical marbles. He’s almost crushingly gentle as he finishes with one arm, dropping it back to Chanyeol’s side and lifting up the other. Like he’s scared he’ll hurt Chanyeol again if he’s not, like he’s trying to prove to the both of them that he’s not a monster. The idea just makes Chanyeol’s head spin – because _he’s _the one who fucks everything up, not Yifan.

When Yifan is finally done and Chanyeol can finally breathe properly, they slip into silence broken by Chanyeol panting to catch his breath. Hands ease down his sides, soothing as they pass back and forth over his ribs.

“I am so, so sorry, Chanyeol.”

“D-don’t be,” Chanyeol’s hands come up to cup Yifan’s face and then stop. They start again and stop again, jerking back and forth because there’s just too much going on inside his head. Yifan says he loves him but he’s not _Chanyeol’s _to love. He’s _Canlie’s._

But he and Canlie are the same person and he just – he wants to comfort Yifan, wants to touch and reassure. So he gives in and lets himself cup Yifan’s jaw. He’s not sure what to do once it’s done, but Yifan smiles at the touch and Chanyeol thinks that maybe this was all he really needed to do, just _be _there for him.

A few moments of soft, comfortable silence stretch on. Chanyeol smiles. Yifan’s face is warm under his hands. Yifan’s hands are warm against his sides.

Chanyeol’s foot tingles like it’s going to fall asleep and he shifts in place to take some weight off of it. Yifan shifts too and his thighs move under Chanyeol’s ass. And it is at that moment that Chanyeol realizes he is sitting in Yifan’s lap, straddling it like he owns it.

He can almost see the moment Yifan realizes it too. His gaze drops from Chanyeol’s eyes to his mouth and Chanyeol can’t help but do the same, stomach dropping out at just how close they are.

He told Yifan that he wanted to be _friends_, just friends. And people who are just friends don’t kiss. People who just met a day ago because one of them is an ancient being who sacrificed themselves to seal winter away after the death of their lover and the other is the moron who let winter out and is the reincarnation of said dead lover don’t kiss. But Chanyeol wants to, he really, really, _really _wants to.

And the way Yifan is staring at him, leaning in just a little bit, says he wants to too.

Chanyeol finds himself leaning in inch by inch, closing the distance between them. His eyes slip shut, head tilting to the side. He can feel Yifan’s breaths against his lips, hands tightening on his hips. They’re so, so _close_.

The front door slams against the wall. Both Yifan and Chanyeol startle and Chanyeol flinches so hard he nearly throws himself out of Yifan’s lap. He doesn’t, because Yifan holds him steady and pulls him closer, pressed flush from the chest down.

“Get down,” Yifan whispers, voice cold as the wind starts to whip around them, “under the blankets. Don’t come out until I tell you to.”

Chanyeol doesn’t have a chance to, though, before footsteps thunder through the living room and then the bedroom door is flying open too. “We found one,” Jongdae shouts, bent over with his hands on his knees as he pants for air, “We found a vessel!” He looks up with a smile that fades as he takes in the way Chanyeol and Yifan are tangled up in each other, Chanyeol still cupping Yifan’s face and Yifan still holding onto Chanyeol’s hips.

Minseok is running in a second later, “Did you get our voicemail? We found a vessel! Oh…Is this – is this a bad time? We can give you two a few minutes, or half an hour, whatever you guys need.” His mouth drops open and Chanyeol’s face is _on fire_.


	6. Chapter 6

“Are you sure this thing can handle the roads right now,” Chanyeol asks as he slides into the backseat of Minseok’s car. The heater is running on high, hot air blasting out of the vents, and he’s honestly not cold, but he doesn’t say anything when Yifan slides in beside him and throws an arm around his shoulders to reel him in.

Jongdae and Minseok are sitting up front; Yifan can take the window seat on the other side of the car, but he doesn’t. He sits in the middle and pulls Chanyeol so close that he’s basically in the middle as well. He meets Minseok’s eyes in the rearview mirror but neither of them say a word about how Chanyeol’s half in Yifan’s lap.

No one’s said anything about how touchy Yifan’s been since Jongdae and Minseok showed up this morning with a cookie jar shaped like Santa Claus’ head and interrupted what would’ve probably been one of, if not _the_, best kiss of Chanyeol’s life. Chanyeol had scrambled out of his arms, but Yifan still kept one hand on him at all times, like he was afraid Chanyeol would just up and disappear if he wasn’t being grounded.

It’s why they’re driving all the way out to the national park from the day before instead of fly. It was the fastest possible option, but Chanyeol watched as Yifan did the math on how many trips he would have to make, how people he could carry at one time – realized that he’d _have _to leave Chanyeol to keep himself warm – and knew that that plan wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

And so, they piled into Minseok’s car for a good, old-fashioned road trip to save the world from winter with the help of an ancient God and Santa Claus cookie jar.

Chanyeol leans his head on Yifan’s shoulder and wonders not for the first time if this is all some crazy fever dream. Maybe he cut his finger on the dagger and got tetanus and Yifan is actually the doctor trying to save his life from a life-threatening fever. People always feel cold when they’re feverish, so it’s really not that wild of a guess, not any wilder than the situation he’s in right now.

“Old family friends charmed the bumper to heat up on contact with anything cold and the snow chains on my tires to have extra traction with the road. We’re perfectly safe.” Minseok throws the car in reverse and then pauses, meets Chanyeol’s eyes in the rearview mirror again. “Buckle up though, don’t want to break the habit.”

Chanyeol smiles softly and nods. He moves his backpack, stuffed full of blankets and snacks and water bottles, from his lap to the floor and buckles himself in. He takes Yifan’s backpack and drops it beside his own before reaching for Yifan’s seatbelt too, but he’s shrugged off. He tries to protest, but Minseok is already backing out of the parking lot and taking off down the road.

Yifan shushes him, guides his head back to his shoulder. “Immortal, remember? It would take something much stronger than any human creation to injure me.”

Chanyeol frowns but can’t come up with any argument outside of simply wanting Yifan to wear a seatbelt. God or not, immortal being with a body made of magic or not, Chanyeol can’t help but imagine Minseok losing control of the car, of them spinning out, of blood and pain and no one coming to help them because the roads are too slick. He imagines what it would be like to bleed out into the snow, frozen solid, all alone.

He feels Yifan’s shoulder shift under his cheek. Lips press against his ear and Yifan softly whispers, “Rest, relax, Chanyeol. I would not have allowed you into this machine if I thought there was even a chance of you coming to harm.”

“Promise,” Chanyeol whispers back.

Yifan sighs, a hot puff of air against Chanyeol’s skin. “I swear upon the Earth and Skies that I would die before putting you in harm’s way.”

And somehow that makes the fear dissipate. Chanyeol settles into Yifan’s hold with a smile and watches the snow-covered landscape of the town pass by without another word.

They drive and drive until the town disappears beyond the horizon. No one says a word, the only sounds are the quiet songs floating in through the radio. It’s one of those year-long Christmas music stations, and when _Let it Snow _starts to play there’s a silent, unanimous decision to turn it off. Jongdae leans over and shuts the whole radio down.

“So, what’s the plan,” Chanyeol stares out the window. The sign for the exit for the national park is almost entirely covered in snow, only the tops of the letters still visible, but Chanyeol’s been there enough to recognize it. “How far into the forest do we have to go? Are we walking? Flying? Sitting on each other’s shoulders like a human totem pole? Like what are we actually doing besides just ‘oh we’re going in and blessing the cookie jar and then saving the world.’”

“Yes to the human totem pole thing,” Jongdae turns around in his seat with a grin as Yifan chuckles in Chanyeol’s ear. “Full on fucking yes for that.”

Minseok swats at Jongdae even though he’s smiling, “No human totem pole! We’d need a trench coat and a rated R movie to sneak into for that to be an option. I think we’re walking? Right, Yifan?”

“No, I will fly you all in individually. Walking would take much too long in the cold and this machine is surprisingly warm. I will take Minseok first, then Jongdae, and then Chanyeol.”

Chanyeol wants to drift off to the sound of Yifan’s voice, eyelids growing heavy as the warmth settles into his bones. It’s so comfortable like this, leaning all his weight on Yifan, wrapped in a big, puffy coat to keep the cold out. Then something taps against his nose and he jerks, blinking his eyes open to Yifan’s finger in front of his face. He looks up to see Yifan staring back at him with a little smile, amusement dancing behind his eyes.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” Chanyeol lies – like a liar. Yifan knows he’s lying too, one of his eyebrows arch up even as his smile widens. Chanyeol can’t help but smile back, rubbing at his eyes and shifting so he’s sitting up and supporting a little bit more of his own weight. “I _wasn’t_. I was just resting my eyes.”

“Focus, Chanyeol, you’ll have all the time in the world to rest once we’re finished,” Yifan says all playful and kind and maybe a little bit endeared. And then his smile drops. Chanyeol’s smile follows a second later, stomach twisting until he thinks he might actually throw up.

Yifan’s the one who’ll have all the time in the world to rest once they’re finished. If this goes to plan, Yifan’ll be asleep before sunset.

Minseok’s GPS beeps to take the next right. Chanyeol thinks it sounds like the end.

***

Yifan sets Chanyeol down beside Jongdae and Minseok in the snow. He sinks in past his ankles and shivers at the cool seeping through his pants. Yifan doesn’t bother attempting to fight the urge to wrap him up, simply pulls the hood of his coat up over his head and forcibly shoves his hands into his pockets to keep them warm.

He is more than a little mollified that Chanyeol just lets him. The human doesn’t like being fawned over like this, but he stands still and lets Yifan coddle anyway. “Warm?”

Chanyeol nods. Yifan watches his eyes go wide as he takes in the forest, the tree limbs coated in ice and snow. Clouds cover the sun, but there is still enough light to make the icicles glint and shine. Jongdae shuffles through the snow towards Yifan, mouth moving as he speaks. All of Yifan’s focus devotes itself to the way Chanyeol’s face scrunches up with glee at the crunching of the snow beneath Jongdae’s feet. He gives a little hop of his own, and then another, taking a moment of joy as he crunches through the snow.

“Hey, Yifan,” fingers snap in front of Yifan’s face and he turns to Jongdae, hoping that the infatuation isn’t obvious on his face. It probably is, if the looks on Minseok and Jongdae’s faces are any indication.

He clears his throat and nods for Jongdae to speak, attempting to look at least somewhat like the powerful, immortal being he is supposed to be.

Jongdae just sighs and holds up the jar he’d brought, a family heirloom that his family brought out every single December. It meets every one of the guidelines the Earth and Skies had set for him the day before; Yifan is honestly a little surprised they were able to find something so quickly. He is also a little surprised at how deeply unsettling the jar is; Santa Claus, a man who Chanyeol says is the symbol for cheer and gift-giving and general kindness, is much less appealing as a disembodied head than he was in the photos Chanyeol showed him on the strange rectangle before they left for the park.

“Once we know this thing is going to hold winter I’m happy to let you watch Chanyeol jump around for as long as you want – hell, go make oversized snow angels if you feel like it,” Jongdae says exasperatedly, “but my cookie jar is sort of the most pressing matter right now.”

“I am aware.” Yifan sits down in the snow at once. He digs through the snow until he is touching the bare, frozen ground. He scratches at the dirt until he can feel the energy thrumming underneath the ground, lets it connect to his own energy. Then, he gestures for Jongdae and Minseok to do the same.

The pair winces at the cold, but their jackets are some of the most well-charmed articles of clothing Yifan has ever seen and the magic woven into the cloth immediately begins to warm them up again. Jongdae shivers regardless, voice going whiny, “God, how did Chanyeol do this yesterday?”

Minseok grits his teeth and shrugs. Yifan honestly isn’t quite sure himself, but his time with Canlie taught him that there are some things that simply cannot be explained.

“I need you all to be quiet and still. I am going to call upon the Earth and Skies now.” Yifan watches Chanyeol freeze in place, face scrunching in determination as he forces his entire body to stay still. It makes Yifan fight back a smile, makes him want to tug Chanyeol over and press kisses along his cheeks to let some of the warm, wriggling feelings in his chest out. Instead, he holds out a hand to Jongdae. “The jar, if you please.”

Jongdae hands it over and the jar is immediately set in the snow, top undone to let the blessing bleed through the thing in its entirety. The Santa Claus head is facing Yifan and he turns it around to stare off in the distance.

He really cannot believe that Jongdae loved that thing as a child. But it is a question for another day. Or for never, seeing as his time awake is rapidly coming to an end.

He forces the thought away and closes his eyes, refuses to let himself feel anything but the power of nature. “Concentrate on how badly you wish to seal winter away, all of you. Let that be the only thing you feel. Let it consume you. Do not stop wishing until I tell you to.”

Yifan gives himself over to the energy and _feels. _It goes quickly, flashes of determination and hope, that strange stubbornness only humans can have. The Earth and Skies flow through them all like water, searching and finding, approving, _blessing_. The energy coalesces in Yifan just as it did before, when it was meant to go to the dagger and then faded away. This time, though, this time it bursts forth and Yifan can see the light of the blessing even with his eyes shut tight.

It feels like only seconds have passed before he opens his eyes to the cookie jar glowing bright blue.

He smiles, hardly registering the way Jongdae and Minseok leap up, screaming with joy, only to knock into each other and fall back down. Yifan reaches for the vessel – it _is _a vessel now – and cradles it in his palms. The Santa Claus head does not seem quite so unnerving anymore.

He looks up to Chanyeol, eager for a glimpse at a smile, a laugh. Chanyeol feels things so intensely that Yifan thinks watching him celebrate might make the moment even better. And Chanyeol is smiling, lips turned up as he stares at the vessel, but there is none of the bursting, radiating, burning energy Yifan has come to know. Instead, Chanyeol smiles at the vessel, must feel some modicum of happiness, but there is sadness in his eyes as well. His smile falters for a moment before he looks up, meets Yifan’s eyes, and plasters on something that doesn’t reach his eyes.

“Chanyeol,” Yifan starts.

Minseok gasps, interrupts whatever he was going to say, “Oh shit, look at the clouds!”

Dark, heavy clouds roll in from the north as the wind suddenly picks up. It’s all much too soon, much too fast. Canlie had mentioned the idea that winter was sentient once, that it had grown something akin to consciousness after going unchecked for so long; Yifan had always laughed it off. He kicks himself for it now.. Nature screams in surprise because this is not a normal storm, not a blizzard brought about by winds and time and cold.

This is an _attack._

Yifan scans the area of somewhere for the humans to hide, to wait it out as he fights one last battle. There’s a cave not far away, hidden in a copse of trees, a small opening with a large rocky overhang to keep the cold out, and he lunges to his feet before grabbing Chanyeol by the arm and shoving him towards it.

“Go,” he yells, “Go now!”

The blizzard picks up speed as though it can hear him. He tosses his and Chanyeol’s backpacks towards the cave mouth. Jongdae and Minseok grab them as they run past, crouching down and crawling underneath the overhang to safety.

Chanyeol stays frozen in his spot, eyes filling with _tears. _The sight of it makes Yifan ache. He wants to stop, wants to cradle Chanyeol’s face in his hands and comfort him, discover the cause of those tears and make it cease to exist.

And he would. In any other moment, at any other time, he _would_. But he cannot now, does not have the time. Snow is already starting to fall, wind blowing fast and sharp and hitting Chanyeol’s face with enough force to turn it red. It’ll be windburned if he doesn’t get to safety soon, and there’s no telling how quickly it’ll take for frostbite to set in.

“Yifan,” Chanyeol tries to speak, but the words get caught in his throat. Yifan grabs him by the shoulders and turns him, forces him to walk to the cave. “Yifan, wait!”

Ice begins to fall to the ground, speed and weight turning them deadly. One lands on the padding of Chanyeol’s hood with _thump_, makes him yelp in pain, and Yifan loses patience. He shoves Chanyeol so hard he’s nearly knocked off his feet. “I’m sorry,” Yifan says, “but you must _go_! There is no time!”

Yifan watches as Chanyeol disappears into the cave and then turns his face up towards the sky. It feels almost as though it’s mocking him, hail and snow pouring down, painful, cold, _death_. It can’t scare him, though, not when he has a vessel in hand. A part of him twinges at the thought of leaving like this, aches at the thought of going back to sleep without saying goodbye. He hopes that Chanyeol and the others come out of the cave in time, but if not, he will have to make due with the fact that Chanyeol will still be alive.

When the sun comes out to warm the world once more, Chanyeol will still be here to see it.

And so, Yifan lifts the vessel with two hands, holding it in front of his face like an offering up to the sky. He stares up at the swirling mass of clouds above. The snow is nearly blinding, but he doesn’t care, doesn’t feel it.

Yifan plants his feet, braces his body against the wind, and _demands _winter to be sealed.

It happens just as it did the first time, all those centuries ago. A wind colored bright white snakes down from the sky and disappears into the vessel, magic sucking it in no matter how winter tries to fight it. The jar glows brighter and brighter, nearly blinding. Yifan keeps his eyes open though. He has to, he _must. _He must if he wants to make sure he gets every last bit.

He watches as winter is pulled inside the vessel, ice blooming all across the ceramic. The wind is dying down, snowfall almost completely stopped. He smiles as the end finally, finally draws near. But then the vessel starts to shake. It shivers in his hands, trembles. The magic stretches, energy inside so violent it makes Yifan feel sick. Something is wrong.

The jar explodes. Ceramic shards are blown apart with such force that they are ground nearly to dust.

“No,” he whispers, “No. This isn’t right.”

The blizzard that had nearly stopped comes back with a vengeance, brings down hail so large it would kill a human in a single blow. Yifan swears, spits out every curse he knows, and then sprints for the cave.

***

“Yifan!” Chanyeol launches himself at Yifan the moment he realizes who’s crawling into the cave. He presses face into Yifan’s neck and shivers at the warmth.

He’s cold, he’s so cold. The air had gotten so cold so fast that it was like every bit of body heat he had was being leeched out of him. Minseok and Jongdae had tried to help, had sandwiched him between them and told him it would be over soon. But it only got colder and colder. Chanyeol knows that it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but it was so fucking _cold_.

Yifan is still swearing when Chanyeol slams into him, rage almost palpable, “The vessel had been blessed, it was everything the Earth and Skies asked for. And yet it broke!” But his arms go around Chanyeol’s back to hold him like it’s second nature.

And then he pauses in the middle of a word and forces them both to step further into the cave, away from the draft blowing in through the mouth. “You’re freezing! Why are you so cold? I left you for hardly more than a few minutes!”

“Just really cold,” Chanyeol murmurs, “Kept getting colder. You’re so warm.”

They end up slumped against the cave wall across from Jongdae and Minseok, Chanyeol wrapped up in Yifan’s arms from behind. Yifan rummages through one of their packs, pulls out one of the blankets they’d brought with them, and throws it over Chanyeol. Chanyeol curls into it with a sigh, burrowing into Yifan’s arms for the warmth.

He can think a little clearer than, remembers that he was launching himself at Yifan for more than just protection from hypothermia. “Thought I wasn’t going to get to say goodbye,” he says trying to whisper even as his voice is bouncing off the cave walls. “You wouldn’t let me say goodbye.”

“A goodbye isn’t worth your safety,” Yifan rests his chin on Chanyeol’s head. It’s a welcome weight.

It’s a moment that Chanyeol wants to capture, lightning in a bottle, warmth and having someone that he cares about so close. But it can’t last, not when he wasn’t supposed to have it in the first place. Yifan wasn’t supposed to come back.

“Goodbyes are the last thing we need to worry about right now, the damned jar broke!” Jongdae leans forward with a sour frown. “Why did it break? What went wrong? I thought it just had to be blessed and then we were home free.”

Chanyeol tilts his head back to get a good look at Yifan’s face and winces at what he sees – despair, confusion, fury. It’s just like when Yifan first showed up in his apartment yesterday. He sighs then, because it feels like it’s been twenty-four _years _since they met, not twenty-four hours.

“Everything was fine,” Yifan tightens his grip on Chanyeol before loosening. Chanyeol grabs one of his arms and squeezes back in what he hopes is a show of comfort. “Winter was being sealed, but then the vessel began to shake and then it simply blew apart, like it couldn’t handle the strain.”

Minseok hums, “Do you think it could’ve been the material? Perhaps it was too much for ceramic? I mean, winter ate through a metal dagger, a ceramic cookie jar is probably child’s play.”

A shake of Yifan’s head. “The cold will eat through anything given enough time, and the jar was blessed to withstand the initial sealing. I’m surprised the Earth and Skies even blessed the thing to begin with if it wasn’t going to work.”

Chanyeol jerks in surprise as an ice chunk as big as his fist comes flying through the mouth of the cave, skittering across the floor to bounce off Yifan’s foot. And then he jerks again because he is just now realizing that Yifan isn’t wearing shoes. Yifan kicks the ice chunk back out with a huff, scoots the two of them further into the cave.

“It’s like winter is mocking me. Horrid thing, I should’ve agreed to die to get rid of it entirely.”

“Don’t say that,” Chanyeol twists in Yifan’s hold to look him in the eye, pins him with a stare as best as he can manage. He gives up almost instantly, gaze dropping to Yifan’s nose. “Just…just don’t, okay? Don’t talk about dying.”

Yifan blinks slowly for a moment and then nods, dipping his head to meet Chanyeol’s eyes again. “I won’t. I’m sorry.”

There’s a beat of awkward silence as Chanyeol turns himself back around to face Jongdae and Minseok; his feels like it’s on fire, embarrassment making him burn hot as Jongdae and Minseok try and fail to pretend like they’re not watching the whole exchange like they’re sitting front row to an opera. “Maybe,” he tries to force the conversation back on topic, “maybe the Earth and Skies didn’t know? Like maybe they thought it would work because it _did _follow all the rules. But, uh…”

“The Earth and Skies know everything, Chanyeol.” Jongdae waves his hands around in a big gesture, “They’re essentially God. Like Yifan is a God, but the Earth and Skies _are _God, you got it? They know everything living creature.”

Minseok sits up then, Jongdae falling back into a flailing heap from where he’d been leaning on his husband. Minseok goes up onto his knees, eyes twinkling with a scary sort of intelligence. “But winter isn’t technically alive. Or it wasn’t when it was created.

“Think about it, a blizzard coming out of nowhere to hit this exact spot just as we finished creating the one thing that could defeat it? That’s not random, that was strategy. That was a _conscious _decision. And so was that ice chunk. The mouth of the cave is angled and protected. Snow and wind can get in, sure, but an ice chunk that big? Not possible.” Minseok paces back and forth as he talks and Chanyeol can only watch in awe, brain spinning, information clicking together like puzzle pieces.

Yifan yells, hand coming down to slam against the cave floor. “Earth and Skies! Winter tricked the Earth and Skies!”

Chanyeol lets himself be manhandled so that he’s sitting fully in Yifan’s lap, the man’s chin hooked over his shoulder as he talks, voice animated and excited and _hopeful,_ “Well, not tricked, exactly, but it has become capable of things since creating a consciousness that the Earth and Skies were not aware of, meaning they would have had no idea the jar wouldn’t work.”

Jongdae sits up from where he’d been lying in a pile on the floor with his frown still in place. “But that doesn’t explain _why _the jar didn’t work. Like what was it that the Earth and Skies didn’t know about?”

After that, the conversation devolves into the craziest brainstorming session Chanyeol has ever seen in his entire life. They all throw out questions and ideas while Yifan shoots them all down, getting more and more agitated as they go.

Chanyeol feels a little like a stress ball, the arms around his middle squeezing whenever Yifan gets a little too worked up.

“Maybe the color was wrong,” Minseok offers.

“The blessing changes the color to blue no matter what the object’s original color is. Not the issue.”

“The size? Or the shape,” Jongdae asks.

“Why would that matter,” Yifan frowns. Jongdae just shrugs and tips his head back, staring at the cave ceiling like it has all the answers.

On and on they go as the light shining in through the mouth of the cave begins to darken. The blizzard rages on and Jongdae and Minseok grab blankets out of Yifan’s backpack when it looks like they’ll be spending the night.

Yifan ends up scrounging up a bunch of twigs and dry grass from the very back of the cave and lights a fire by scratching his nails against the cave floor. It won’t last the whole night, but the light and heat of it is more than welcome. Helps them see as night falls and the cold sets in like poison.

“Hey, Yifan,” Chanyeol says during a lull, everyone busy eating some of the snacks they’d brought just in case of an emergency. Yifan has his head tipped back against the cave wall, eyes shut as he rubs at his left temple. He hums in response “I’m just wondering, but what did winter look like when you were sealing it away? Like snow or ice or something?”

Yifan pauses for a moment, jaw clenching. Chanyeol watches the tendon tense, can almost _hear _Yifan’s teeth grinding. Guilt makes his chest pull tight and he panics, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. It doesn’t matter, I was just curious. Forget I said anything.”

“No, no, no, that’s a good question, Chanyeol. A very good question. Winter looked like wind,” Yifan says after a moment, eyes cracking open. “Magic is a bit like air, winter in particular, and so anything meant to hold magic where it does not want to be held would have to be airtight. No entries or exits of any kind.”

“It had a lid,” Jongdae says with a groan, “That was the problem. The jar had a lid – an _exit_. Winter fucking weaseled its way out of there.”

Minseok sighs, “We thought it would work because it was a screw on lid, tight enough to keep a kid out, but we were wrong. The vessel has to be just one whole airtight object. Son of a bitch – I mean, at least we figured it out, but son of a _bitch!”_

Yifan slumps in what is probably exhaustion but feels like uncomfortably like defeat to Chanyeol. “So, the vessel must be somehow symbolic of winter, treasured by the person who wishes to seal winter away, and airtight. Once the blizzard ends I will fly us all back to the car, can any of you think of something you have that would work? Of course, there could also be a thousand other restrictions we aren’t currently aware of.”

“Hell,” Minseok shrugs, “I’m really not sure. I mean I have this weird platter of cheese knives that look like snowmen. Or maybe, I don’t know, that ornament Jongdae got me for our anniversary last year.”

Chanyeol sits up with a gasp. He has flashes of two nights ago, of running around the antique shop in a blind panic. He’d been so upset about breaking the dagger, so worried about what would happen if Jongdae and Minseok found out. He’d just started throwing shit in his backpack; he was searching for his phone, but he was throwing anything he touched in there, his cleaning rag, a receipt a customer forgot to take with them that day. He’d even taken –

“Oh shit,” he lunges for his backpack, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” He didn’t clean everything out when he got home, didn’t bother to the morning after or that morning before they left to drive to the park. He pulls out all the snacks and blankets left inside until he gets to the receipt and the cleaning rag, digs through the other pockets like a madman, ignoring how Yifan, Jongdae, and Minseok are calling his name.

And from the very front pocket he pulls out his favorite ornament, painted blue and covered in glittery white swirls that remind him of the howling winds. Of a winter storm. He looks up from it and meets Yifan’s eyes in the light of the fire, watches as they grow wide in realization and wonder.

Chanyeol smiles. “I think I’ve got a vessel.”


	7. Chapter 7

“Do you really think this will work,” Minseok asks as he crawls out of the cave.

The blizzard has finally stopped and Yifan knows that this is likely one of their last chances to seal winter away. Winter isn’t smart, per say, but it isn’t stupid. It knows who they are and what they wish to do; he’s not sure it will give them another opening if they don’t stop it now.

Their hopes rests in the bauble dangling from Yifan’s finger, smaller than the size of his palm but somehow supposed to hold one of nature’s most destructive forces. It meets all the requirements they know of, but Yifan is still very unsure whether they’re making the right choice.

He looks up from glittering white swirls against dark blue paint and meets Chanyeol’s eyes. He’s smiling – face determined and hopeful even with the tip of his nose turning red from the cold. Yifan reminds himself that it doesn’t matter what _he _thinks, just Chanyeol. If Chanyeol believes it will work, then Yifan believes in him. Even if the idea of placing such an important decision into the hands of a man who doesn’t bother to read warning signs makes him uncomfortably nervous.

“Yes,” Yifan nods and leads them all into the snow a few paces away from the cave, close enough to run for shelter if they need.

Jongdae sighs and runs his fingers through his hair, shakes his arms and legs out as though he’s trying to burn off some of the anxiety Yifan knows they all feel. “Not like we have any other choice. It’s either the ornament or running back to town to find something else and hoping winter doesn’t come down and obliterate us when we try.”

“Aren’t we hoping that winter doesn’t obliterate us now?” Yifan watches how Minseok and Jongdae gravitate towards each other, Jongdae’s arms opening up for Minseok to fall into like it’s second nature, like breathing.

“Winter didn’t expect us to have two possible vessels, I believe. That should give us a bit of an edge,” Yifan explains. He sinks down into the snow, mouth thinning into a grim line when it comes up past his hips. “But we have to work quickly to keep that advantage. Once the vessel is blessed, we’ll likely have minutes to seal winter away before it can gather another storm.”

The snow crunches beside Yifan. He blinks in surprise when he sees Chanyeol settling down into the snow as well, a little shiver running up his spine at the cold. They share a smile but there’s something distinctly painful about it.

This might be one of the last times they ever smile at each other again.

And so, when Chanyeol holds his hand out, Yifan takes it, takes the risk of pressing his lips to Chanyeol’s knuckles because he doesn’t know if he’ll ever have the chance again.

“You can do it,” Chanyeol squeezes his hand. His hair falls into his face, pushed up by his hood.

Yifan reaches up without thinking and tucks some of it behind his too-large, too-endearing ears. “_We _can do it. You and I have become quite a team, don’t you think?”

They share a moment, a moment that ends much too quickly because they simply don’t have the time. Winter is watching, waiting. It’s distracted now, but there is no telling when it will notice that they haven’t been defeated. Yifan forces himself to turn away from Chanyeol and address them all. “I should have a few moments after winter is sealed to say goodbye. If I do not, I want you all to know that, while I wish we had met on better terms, I am very happy to have known you. Even if only for a short time. I feel as close to you three after only a few days as I do some of those I knew for years.”

Jongdae laughs, but it’s a little watery. “Nothing bonds people together like shared trauma.”

Yifan sighs through his nose, a little amused, a little fond, “Even so, I am proud to say that I have met you.”

They all murmur something of the same, voice quiet even in the dead silence of winter. He feels Chanyeol’s grasp on his hand tighten until it would bruise another human. Yifan has to stop himself from turning to comfort him, knowing that if he does it will be much, much too hard to commit to sealing winter away.

The ornament is set in the snow, just like the dagger and the cookie jar before it. “Now, you all know what to do. Do everything just as you did yesterday. And be prepared to run to the cave for cover once I begin sealing winter away, just in case another blizzard comes.” Minseok, Jongdae, and Chanyeol all nod before closing their eyes.

Yifan shoves his free hand down through the snow to the dirt – he hopes the Earth and Skies understand why he cannot bear to pull free from Chanyeol. He feels energy, and sinks in.

Unlike the two times before, when Yifan was so focused on winter, on saving the world, all he feels now is Chanyeol. He should be feeling Jongdae, Minseok, and Chanyeol together, the Earth and Skies slipping amongst them to determine if they truly wish to seal winter away, if they are determined enough to save the world, _everything is Chanyeol_.

Peals of laughter, flashes of his smile. The way he fits in Yifan’s arms, the way his hand feels in Yifan’s grip right now.

It makes no sense because he _is _focused on sealing winter away. He knows he is. Yifan knows that sealing winter away is the only way to keep Chanyeol safe, and so he refuses to let himself think about anything else. He doesn’t understand why the Earth and Skies keep feeding into the unending cycle of _Chanyeol, Chanyeol, Chanyeol_.

And then he feels Chanyeol, _really _feels him. Yifan’s heart aches as he pours out want for Yifan to stay, pours out guilt about wanting him to stay. Yifan can feel his apology, how he is determined to seal winter away by also how badly the idea of it hurts because it means Yifan will have to go back to sleep.

There is no comfort anyone can offer him. Chanyeol is human, and humans feel with their entire beings, feel things irrationally and without thought. Humans feel even when it hurts – _especially _when it hurts. Humans feel one way even when they know they’re going to do another because it is the right thing to do. Chanyeol misses Yifan even as he asks the Earth and Skies to help them seal winter away.

When Yifan opens his eyes, he turns to see tear tracks running down Chanyeol’s face, bottom lip bitten nearly to the point of bleeding.

Chanyeol’s eyes flutter open and Yifan sees bittersweet pain inside them. He squeezes Chanyeol’s hand in his own and tries to offer him a smile that he knows doesn’t reach his eyes. He opens his mouth to tell Chanyeol that he knows, that he saw his pain. Chanyeol speaks first, lets out a huff of air that sounds like something between a sob and a laugh, “It worked.”

Yifan’s head snaps back towards where the ornament, jaw dropping open. He hadn’t even noticed that the ornament turned bright blue.

The blessing worked, now all that is left is to seal winter away. Yifan knows it, Chanyeol knows it, they all know it.

Winter knows it too.

“Go,” Yifan whispers as he plucks the ornament from the snow, “Hide in the cave until until it is safe.” He can already feel the beginnings of another blizzard rumble through the ground. He stands and pulls Chanyeol to his feet as well.

Minseok and Jongdae make abortive little movements back towards the cave, but Chanyeol stays where he is, a bittersweet smile on his lips. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, “We’re a team, remember?”

Yifan’s chest aches, tears prick the backs of his eyes. He loves Chanyeol more than he can bear, wishes that they could truly be a team more than he can say. He wants Chanyeol by his side more than he has ever wanted anything. But he can’t always get what he wants, no one can. The world isn’t made for everyone to get everything they want, _life _isn’t made for everything to get everything they want. If it was, it wouldn’t be life. Yifan wants so many things, but he has to pick what he wants the most, what he would die for – he’d die a thousand times over if it meant Chanyeol would live.

“This is my purpose, Chanyeol, my job. It requires me to focus entirely on willing winter into the vessel. I won’t be able to afford even the slightest bit of my concentration to protect you,” Yifan pours his heart and soul into the worlds, hopes that Chanyeol will understand how much he is loved. How much Yifan is going to miss him.

But Chanyeol just smiles, tears welling up and rolling down his face. “But you’re not going to be sealing winter away, Yifan. I am.”

***

Chanyeol knew it was going to come down to him before he opened his eyes during the blessing. The Earth and Skies could feel how badly he didn’t want Yifan to go. He wanted to save the world, but goddamn he didn’t want Yifan to go. He remembers how scared he’d been of the Earth and Skies seeing how selfish he is, how he could even think of letting winter destroy the planet. All because he wanted Yifan to stay.

He doesn’t remember much of what had happened during the blessing, when the Earth and Skies were seeing the worst parts of him. It didn’t feel like a conversation, like an argument, it felt like telling his mother he was gay and hearing _Ah, Chanyeol, I already knew. I don’t care, I love you for you._

It felt like falling into someone’s arms, cared for and safe and unafraid of being cast aside.

The Earth and Skies didn’t care that he was selfish, that a part of him wanted Yifan to stay even if it meant sacrificing the rest of the world, because he was there, asking them to help seal winter anyway.

It was sacrificing his own wants for everyone else, and it was _strong_. Strong enough to lock winter up in a way pure willpower simply can’t. The Earth and Skies showed him pure, crushing force, unyielding hurt.

“The Earth and Skies told me,” is what he tells Yifan when the man stares at him with big, disbelieving eyes. “I’m the one who has to seal winter away this time.”

Yifan shakes his head, a vigorous, angry side-to-side that makes Chanyeol’s head hurt just to watch it. “No,” Yifan says, “not an option. You’re not doing that. It’s too dangerous, you cannot handle the brunt of winter’s fury. I won’t allow it.” He keeps the ornament in his hand, hides it behind his back. It reminds Chanyeol of a kid playing keep-away and if the situation weren’t so fucked he’d probably laugh at him.

But the situation is fucked. It’s so so so fucked. So he just holds his hand out and hits Yifan with his best pleading stare. “Please, Yifan. Trust me, I can do it.”

Yifan doesn’t budge and Chanyeol can see the desperate fear in his eyes. “You _can’t, _Chanyeol. Winter isn’t going to go easily, isn’t going to simply let you defeat it because the Earth and Skies told you that you had to. Winter is going to send the worst of its storms, do anything it can to stop you, hurt you, _kill_ you.” There’s a moment of silence as they stare at each other, both of them too stubborn for their own good.

“You cannot ask me to put you in harm’s way,” Yifan whispers.

Chanyeol nods, because he knows. He doesn’t love Yifan, but he knows how much Yifan loves him. He’d never ask him for something like that. He steps in close, until the miniscule difference in their heights matter and he has to look up at Yifan. “I’m not asking you to, I’m telling you to. Give me the ornament, Yifan.”

Yifan’s eyes squeeze shut in what can only be anger, but he hands the ornament over anyway. Chanyeol takes the thing with both hands, feels the way it’s almost vibrating in his hands, feels the responsibility he’s been handed in the pounding of his heart, the rush of blood in his ears, in the way he feels like his legs are about to give out.

He’s never been so scared in his entire life.

Dark clouds roll in overhead, thunder booming from not very far away. A sudden gust of wind nearly blows him over, so strong Chanyeol’s feet slip. But he stays rooted, because Yifan grabs him around the waist and holds him steady, “I’m not leaving your side, do you understand? I don’t care what you ‘tell’ me to do. I am _not leaving you_.”

And Chanyeol smiles because that’s all he wants right now.

He isn’t sure how to seal winter away. There’s no instruction manual, no tutorial for timing or motions or emotions. He doesn’t even know how to start. The storm is getting closer, flurries of snow floating to the ground as lightning flashes in the sky.

Two more sets of arms wrap around him and he jumps. “It’s about get real cold,” Minseok says, “thought you wouldn’t mind some extra heaters.”

Jongdae laughs, “Friends don’t let friends fight supernatural battles for the fate of the world alone.”

Chanyeol nods, too scared to speak as the snow suddenly changes to freezing rain, wind blowing faster and harder, howling all around where they’re huddled together. He looks down at the ornament, sitting pretty and motionless in his hand, and wishes it would _do _something, wishes it would seal winter away.

A thin, wispy plume of what looks like white smoke appears, a miniature tornado that disappears inside the vessel. He blinks at it, thinks again about how much he wants to force winter inside, and another tornado, larger than the first, appears. Chanyeol plants his feet in the snow as best he can, glares daggers at the vessel, and demands that winter be sealed away for the rest of eternity.

The wind is a physical, punching force. A gust slams into them, almost painful in a blunt, crushing sort of way. Chanyeol’s thoughts get a little scrambled, a little disoriented as he tries to cope with the stinging bite of the cold on his hands. The wind doesn’t stop. The single gust keeps howling, traps them in a wind tunnel.

Chanyeol feels Jongdae start to slip. The wind is blowing maybe sixty or seventy miles an hour and he can feel when Jongdae starts to lose hold.

He goes tumbling off into the snow with a yelp, rolling and rolling until he hits the base of a tree. “Jongdae,” Minseok screams. Jongdae sits up, dazed but seemingly unharmed. “Jongdae, are you okay?”

“He can’t hear you over the wind,” Yifan shouts so loudly Chanyeol’s ears ring. “Let go and get yourselves behind a tree, somewhere the wind isn’t blowing. It is only going to get worse from here!”

Minseok looks conflicted, eyes darting between Chanyeol’s face and where Jongdae is slowly trying to get to his feet. “You won’t let go of Chanyeol, right? You have to keep him warm.” Yifan nods, and then Minseok is gone too, letting the wind push him as he runs to help his husband. They disappear behind one of the bigger trees and Chanyeol and Yifan let out a sigh of relief.

Chanyeol feels the wind pick up, blowing faster and faster. Chanyeol can only keep his thoughts together for moments at a time, just bits and pieces of winter being sealed away. He can’t focus for long with Yifan holding onto him, can’t find the space to breathe and settle. It’ll take hours, and they don’t have hours, not when Jongdae might be hurt, not when he and Minseok are hiding behind a tree, hopefully not being blown away by the godawful wind. Not when Chanyeol knows that he can’t be out in this cold four hours even with Yifan here.

They’re never going to win this way.

“Let go of me!”

Yifan’s grip tightens, borders on painful as he grits out, “What? What in the world did you just say to me, Chanyeol?”

“You have to let go! I can’t – I can’t think with you here! I just keep thinking about how I don’t want to lose you!” Chanyeol blinks back tears, scared that if they fall they’ll just freeze. “I need to seal winter away, and I need to do it right now, but I can’t focus with you here so you have to let me go!”

“I can’t lose you. I lost Canlie long ago and I have made peace with that, but I do not think I can survive losing you.”

“You’re not going to. Just trust me, okay?”

Chanyeol can’t even see Yifan anymore, snow and freezing rain coming down so heavily that the blizzard has whited out his vision. But he can feel warm lips press against his cheek, can feel the grip around his waist loosen bit by bit before disappearing completely.

Chanyeol goes flying, slamming to a tree. It knocks the wind out of him, makes him gasp and choke for a few long moments. Without Yifan there to help keep him warm, the wind sneaks up the sleeves of his coat. The cold seeps in, chills him down to his bones. He starts to shiver so hard, teeth chattering loud enough he can hear it over the storm. He has to close his eyes to keep the ice, snow, and wind out. Winter bears down him with a hand around his throat and Chanyeol realizes that this, _this _is the scariest moment of his life.

He wonders if he’s going to die.

And then he decides that if he’s going to die, he’s going to take winter with him.

He bares his teeth up at the storm, feels determination unlike anything he’s ever felt surge through his veins.

Chanyeol thinks about badly he doesn’t want to lose Yifan, but it’s coupled with the knowledge that Yifan _has _to go, that he can’t be selfish, not like this. It hurts worse than the numbness creeping up his fingers and toes, but he grits his teeth through the pain, feels it with his entire being. He doesn’t love Yifan, but he _could_. God, he could, he could love him so easily.

“This is all your fault!,” he yells. He screams it over and over until his throat feels raw, until he’s coughing for air again.

He sees flashes of what their life together could have been, or maybe what it was. There’s laughter and joy, warmth in the chest that grows and blooms with each passing day, the world passing underneath them as they fly, never being lonely again because there is someone out there who is always there. He wants it, he wants it so badly that the tears finally spill over and freeze almost immediately, burning so cold against his skin.

If Chanyeol has to give up all of that to seal winter away, then winter is going to be sealed and fucking _stay _sealed.

Time loses meaning, passes by in maybe minutes, maybe seconds, maybe hours. Slowly, he feels the ornament get heavier. It’s not physically getting heavier and heavier, which is good because Chanyeol can’t feel much of anything past his shoulders or hips and he doesn’t think he could handle much more weight. But he knows that if he was able to open his eyes, he’d see that strange tornado spiraling, disappearing into the vessel.

“Chanyeol,” three voice scream his name at different times. They scream it like a chant, like a prayer.

He’s surprised he can even hear them over the wind. And then he realizes that the wind is dying down. He can’t feel the loss, can’t feel if the storm has passed. He can’t feel anything, floating inside his head like a paper boat on a river.

Chanyeol feels himself falling sideways though. He feels his body hit the ground, pain dulled to the point where he can’t really even register it as a sensation.

It’s already too much of a struggle to keep breathing, body wanting to be still and silent.

Then he’s _burning_. He tries to scream as his face is doused in fire, heat forcing his nerves to wake up and scream even when his throat can’t. He’s moved around, shifted, and then pressed against the inside of a volcano. When he finally does find enough voice to whisper, “Stop, it hurts! Please, please stop!”

“There you are, Chanyeol. Keep talking to me. Minseok, Jongdae, hand me one of your coats to put over his chest. Do not touch his hands or feet, we want his center warmed first.”

Moments later, his chest is consumed in flames and he can’t move enough to get out from under it. “Why are you doing this?” Chanyeol cries, feels tears gather in his eyes and slowly eek out from under his eyelids.

“Are we hurting him,” someone asks, voice horrified, “He’s crying.”

The burning on his face slides down to his neck and stays there, a cruel, excruciating pain. “He thinks so, yes. His body is so cold that everything is going to feel too hot. Tears are good, Jongdae, it’s how we know he’s still alive.”

Chanyeol finally registers a name, finally recognizes the voice right next to his ear. “Yifan,” he croaks, “Yifan…_hurts_.”

“I know it does, but you will feel much better soon. Just breathe for me, Chanyeol. We are going to take you back to the car and then you are going to feel so much better. You promised I would not have to lose you, remember?” It hurts, but Chanyeol manages to force his eyes open, groggy and confused he tries to see. His eyes slowly focus on Yifan’s face.

“Hi.”

Yifan smiles, lips pressing against Chanyeol’s forehead. “Hi. You scared me, Chanyeol. You scared me so badly I thought I would die.”

Chanyeol frowns, words slurring a little, “’m sorry. Didn’t want to scare you.” He blinks up at Yifan, up past Yifan, to the clearing sky. “Did it work? Did I do it?”

Yifan just nods, smile turning sad around the edges and Chanyeol smiles sleepily back, eyes slipping shut as he finds enough energy to tuck his face into Yifan’s neck. He’s so tired, but he forces himself to stay awake when Yifan asks him to. He curls his hands in Yifan’s shirt and stays awake. He drifts though, can’t help but drift as time passes around them. He’s shifted occasionally, warm breaths tickling his face as he listens to distant murmurs of conversation.

He doesn’t feel fully alert until he’s being laid down. He blinks his eyes back open and jerks when he sees the inside of Minseok’s car. “Wha-”

Minseok and Jongdae are in the front seats already, all buckled in and fiddling with the controls for the heater. Chanyeol realizes he’s been settled in the backseat with all their coats piled on top of him. The driver’s side backdoor is still open and Yifan is standing there, bent over as he tucks the coats in around Chanyeol’s body.

He looks up when Chanyeol calls his name and sighs, crawling along the floor until he’s squeezed himself up by Chanyeol’s head. Over his shoulder, dangling from the rearview mirror like a pair of fuzzy dice or a car freshener, is the ornament.

Chanyeol feels a pit open up in his stomach. He reaches over and tries to grasp at Yifan’s hand, heart in his throat. “Yifan, no, don’t go,” he whimpers, “That’s not fair, I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

But Yifan just shushes him, “The Earth and Skies have given me extra time to make sure you were taken care of, but that time is up. Please, Chanyeol, please do not make this harder for me than it already is. I don’t want to leave you either.”

“Then don’t.”

Yifan gives a sad little laugh, mouth twisting into a strange, pained expression. “But if I stay, winter will break through and everything we have done these past few days will have been for nothing.” One large hand smooths over Chanyeol’s hair, thumb rubbing at his temple. “My time with you has been a waking dream, but it is time for me to go back to sleep. I love you so dearly, Chanyeol, and I can go to sleep peacefully knowing that you will wake up tomorrow morning to a brilliant sunrise.”

Chanyeol can’t find the words to respond, just chokes out half a sob and tries to cling to Yifan’s wrist. Yifan lets him cling for a moment, but then he’s pulling away. He presses one last kiss to Chanyeol’s forehead and Chanyeol feels a tear splash against his skin.

Chanyeol can only watch as Yifan crawls back out of the car and gently shuts the door behind him. He can only watch through the windshield as Yifan walks into the copse of trees without looking back and disappears into the shadows.

He can’t make himself watch Yifan fly away though, turning his face away from the windows and squeezing his eyes shut because he’s scared it will just hurt too badly to watch him go. But then he looks, just for a moment, because he knows he’ll always regret it if he doesn’t get this last second, and sees a dark shape fly high, high up into the air before becoming one with the clouds.

It’s hard, but Chanyeol manages to keep it together for most of the ride home. It’s silent, only the sound of the heater to be heard. Minseok and Jongdae aren’t even holding hands over the consol like they usually do, instead staying on their separate sides of the car. Chanyeol knows they’re doing it for him and he wants to tell them not to, but he’s not sure if he can handle watching them be together right now.

He holds himself together into they’re driving into city limits. Until the clouds part and the sun shines down over them all, warming up the world bit by bit. Chanyeol stares up at the sun for a long moment, a sun Yifan will never get to see.

Then he buries his face in the nearest coat, and cries.

***

The last of the icicles that form on the gutter of the shop every winter is finally melting, dripping water onto the pavement below. It was a short winter this year, coming to a stop on March’s doorstep. Chanyeol wonders if it’s because of what happened last year. Probably, that would make sense to him, at least.

Chanyeol sits on his stool in behind the cash register and stares out at the empty store. Jongdae and Minseok are on a business trip to collect a magical tapestry known for strangling dishonest lovers – took out a CEO of a major corporation in Russia and the local magic keepers decided it was something only Minseok and Jongdae could take care of. They left a few days ago, due to return in the morning. They’d offered for Chanyeol to come along, have a change of scenery, treat himself after a long year.

And it was a long year, the longest year in his entire life. Most of it is blurry. Spring was dedicated to grieving, adjusting to emptiness in his stomach that never leaves, summer was trying to find joy like he used to before Yifan, fall was realizing things were never going to go back to how they were before Yifan, and winter was just lonely. So, so lonely.

Jongdae and Minseok are always around, always over at his apartment or dragging him to their house. But he’s still so lonely.

Sometimes he hates Yifan for doing this, for making some part of him realize that Yifan was all it wanted and then disappearing. Sometimes he dreams about Yifan, about lying on the couch, explaining how phones work, about making dinner together in a tiny kitchen that really can’t fit two men their size. Mostly, Chanyeol just misses him.

The world has moved on from last winter and the devastating storms. It’s old news now; he heard people on the street talk about it like a crazy dream. The world has moved on, but Chanyeol can’t.

He turns his head and stares at the door to the backroom, thinks about going inside and staring at the velvet bag holding the ornament, maybe pulling it out and letting the bright blue remind him of why he did what he did. But he doesn’t, because it really only makes him feel better for a little while and then he gets the overwhelming urge to slam the vessel against the wall and see if it will break. He never does it, but he doesn’t like the feeling.

Instead, he takes out his phone and goes to his home screen. He stares at the photo Minseok sent to him the day after Yifan left, one he took the night before of the two of them curled up together against the cave wall. Chanyeol was asleep, head lolled back on Yifan’s shoulder. Yifan was awake but unaware of Minseok taking the picture, too busy staring down at Chanyeol with this smile that chases away some of the hurt in Chanyeol’s chest.

Chanyeol closes up the shop a half hour later and starts the walk home. He pauses outside the front window and crouches down. The little flower had somehow survived last year’s winter and is still growing, bud unfurling pink petals into what Chanyeol thinks is going to be a beautiful sight.

He looks up at the clear night sky and takes a deep breath. It was warm out today, warm enough that he only has to wear a light jacket in the early evening.

He thinks about how excited Yifan would have been to see it. The grief hits him in the stomach, a sucker-punch that hurts just as bad as it did right after Yifan left. But Chanyeol is able to let it pass now. He breathes through the pain until it eases. And then he continues on home.

Chanyeol wakes up early in the morning to a crash and a curse, shooting straight up in bed, heart pounding in fear and confusion. For a second, he thinks it was just a dream following him out of sleep, but then he hears footsteps out in the living room.

The footsteps wander around, no purpose or direction. It sounds like they’re just exploring his apartment. He’s not sure what’s scarier, the idea that someone broke into his apartment for fun or for a reason. Either way, Chanyeol slowly eases out of bed. He tries to avoid making any noise that will alert the person on the other side of the door. But when he sets his full weight on the floor, one of the floorboards creaks.

The footsteps stop and then hurry towards the bedroom. Chanyeol stands, completely frozen with fear, watching as the very beginnings of the sunrise shine under the door and show him the shadow of two feet.

Someone jiggles the handle. It turns with a _click, _and then the door is swinging open. He can’t make himself move, can’t make himself scream, can’t do anything but wait with blood roaring in his ears as the bedroom door gently thuds against the wall. And in the doorway is a tall, broad shadow of a person that steps inside without a second of hesitation. Chanyeol’s heart leaps into his throat.

“Chanyeol? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Chanyeol’s eyes focus in the low light and he drops to the floor, curling in on himself as he heartbroken sob works its way out of his chest. “_Yifan?”_

He tries to push himself back up to his feet but Yifan is already there, kneeling beside him and tugging him into a hug. Chanyeol cries into Yifan’s shoulder, not sure if it’s a dream or if he’s died in his sleep and this is his afterlife. He wouldn’t complain if it was.

“I missed you,” Yifan says, “I missed you so much. I dreamt about you constantly. I didn’t even dream the first time I fell asleep, but after meeting you I couldn’t _stop_ dreaming.”

Chanyeol just clings to Yifan on the bedroom floor, fists the fabric of his shirt and refuses to let go. “Am I dead?”

Yifan laughs and shakes his head. “No, not dead. Not dreaming either. I’m here, Chanyeol, and I’ll be here for as long as you’ll have me.”

“But how?” Chanyeol pulls back and gives a watery smile when Yifan goes to wipe away his tears. “I-I thought you… The deal?”

Yifan nods, hums, leans in and kisses Chanyeol’s nose. He eases Chanyeol to his feet and pulls them both up onto the bed. Chanyeol crawls into Yifan’s lap immediately. He feels safe, he feels cared, he feels happy, he feels _whole_.

“The deal still stands But the Earth and Skies are kind, they love more than anyone can ever imagine. And they hate to see their creatures hurting,” Yifan murmurs into Chanyeol’s hair, sounding absolutely blissful. “But we were. You were hurting and I was hurting. The Earth and Skies wanted to fix it somehow, but they couldn’t allow me to wake because it would go against the rules of the deal that kept part of winter sealed.

“But then they decided that if only _part _of winter had to be sealed away, then only _part _of me had to sleep. I was then split into two people, the God who sleeps, and the powerless mortal who is here with you.”

“A-and you’re okay with that? With giving up all your powers just to be…with me?” Chanyeol cranes his back to look Yifan in the eye, the tips of his ears heating up at the incredulous look on Yifan’s face.

“I am more than okay. I would have given up _anything_ to be with you. My powers as a God meant nothing to me, not when having them meant losing you.” Yifan hums a happy melody as they sit in silence. Chanyeol wonders if he should say something, _do _something, but all he really wants to do is sit quietly in Yifan’s arms just like this.

And so he does. He sits there and soaks up Yifan’s affection as morning slowly but surely breaks over the horizon. He’s glad he didn’t remember to close the curtains last night, because it means that they have a perfect view of the sunrise.

Yifan gasps once he sees, eyes going and mouth dropping open in wonder. The sunlight peers in through the window, soft and warm, spring waking up the world in bits and pieces.

Chanyeol smiles, smiles so widely it hurts his cheeks. This is Yifan’s first sunrise, and _he _gets to share it. They get to have this moment _together_. “Is it as beautiful as you pictured it,” he asks in a whisper, scared to ruin the moment.

Yifan turns away from the sunrise then, turns his gaze towards Chanyeol as his eyes sparkle, "More beautiful than I could have ever imagined, and only getting more beautiful with every second.”

Chanyeol’s chest warms, heat blooming across his nose and cheeks in embarrassment. Yifan traces the path of the blush with a fingertip, a smile breaking out across his own face. Chanyeol arches up as Yifan leans down.

And the sun rises as their lips meet, their first kiss of their first day together. With many more to come.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! If you liked it, please leave a kudos and a comment, they make me so happy! You can find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/killmeDO) and [Curious Cat](https://curiouscat.me/killmeDO) Sometimes I talk about what I'm working on next and post snippets! I'd love to hear from you <3


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